Evaluation of tension and compression behavior of elastomeric composite material

Abstract

Elastomeric composite material exhibit a highly nonlinear mechanical response that varies significantly with the applied deformation mode, particularly under large strain conditions. This behavior makes the selection of an appropriate hyperelastic constitutive model essential for achieving reliable numerical predictions. In this study, the uniaxial tensile and compressive behaviors of elastomeric composite material are experimentally investigated and subsequently reproduced through finite element simulations conducted in Abaqus software. Several commonly used hyper elastic strain-energy formulations, including Ogden models of different orders and Reduced Polynomial models, are identified using experimental stress–strain data and systematically compared. The results show that although lower-order models can represent the initial stiffness with reasonable accuracy, they fail to adequately describe the response at large deformations. Among the examined formulations, the sixth-order Ogden model provides the closest agreement with experimental results in tension, accurately capturing the pronounced strain-stiffening behavior observed at high stretch levels. In contrast, the second-order Reduced Polynomial model offers superior performance in compression by effectively reproducing both the initial softening response and the subsequent stiffness increase associated with material densification. These findings confirm the strong dependence of hyper elastic model performance on deformation mode and demonstrate that different constitutive formulations may be required for tensile and compressive loading conditions. The results provide practical guidance for the numerical modeling and design of sandwich structures incorporating elastomeric composite material cores.