MATERIAL PARAMETER OF RUBBER GLOVE VULCANIZED USING COMBINED INFRARED AND HOT-AIR HEATING

Abstract

Vulcanization is an important chemical-thermal process in production of rubber products resulting in change of material properties, increased elasticity and strength. In general, Young’s modulus is used as an indicator of elastic deformation at loading configuration. However, rubber is not truly elastic and a single parameter is insufficient to describe the whole deformation contributed by microstructure of rubber network. Therefore, we present the material parameters concerning the mechanical interaction of rubber constituents. In this study, tensile force and elongation were measured to analyze the rubber deformation. In order to describe the deformation behavior of the combined infrared and hot-air vulcanized rubber glove, the material properties, stress and stretch, were therefore presented. The stress-stretch relationships of the vulcanized rubber gloves were established based on previously well-known hyperelastic material model and their material parameters were determined using a parameter estimation technique. In conclusion, the stress-stretch relationships of the combined infrared and hot-air vulcanized rubber glove can be successfully established with our optimized material parameters; the magnitudes of rubber modulus (C_R) and locking stretch (λ_L) were in a range of 0.041-0.079 MPa and 10.27-70.12, respectively. Furthermore, the resulting material parameters can be properly used to indicate the micro structural deformation.