Simulation of a chassis bushing with regard to strain induced softening of filled rubber

A material model is presented, which describes the material behavior of rubbery materials in the case of uniaxial tension/compression. It includes the characteristic nonlinearity of rubber at large strains as well as strain induced softening called Mullins effect. The generalization to arbitrary deformations is done with the concept of representative directions, published by Freund & Ihlemann [2] utilizing a numerical integration on a unit sphere. An FE simulation of a chassis bushing shows that the Mullins effect is reproduced appropriately, verifying the preceding material characterization. (© 2016 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)