Dr. Sean Teller has published an article titled “High Strain Rate Testing of Elastomers and Thermoplastic Elastomers” in RubberWorld magazine’s January, 2019 edition. Elastomers and TPEs are used in many different applications and industries, including automotive, aerospace, consumer products, electronics, biomedical devices, and heavy industry. These materials are increasingly being used in high strain rate and impact applications.
Understanding how a material behaves is critical to choosing the best material and optimizing the design of a component to the loading conditions in use. Precise testing is therefore essential. Testing elastomers and TPEs at high strain rates is particularly difficult, complicated by low sample forces, low density, and low wave speed (or acoustic impedance). Careful experimental test machine design and selection are necessary to obtain accurate, reliable results. In this article, Dr. Teller explains the different test methods available to test elastomers and TPEs, as well as explain advantages and disadvantages. He also discusses how the data can be used to select and calibrate a material model for use in a finite element (FE) analysis. Click here for a PDF version .