Interfacial Friction in Filled Polymers Initiated by Adhesive Debonding

When a rubber is subjected to stress-strain cycles, a part of the energy of deformation is dissipated as heat. This effect is called hysteresis. I t has been recognized for years that hysteresis in filled rubbers is a complicated phenomenon comprising different mechanisms. The overall loss of energy in the strain cycle has been shown to be the sum of irrecoverable and recoverable (repeatable) dissipative processes.¹ The first process, known as the Mullins effect, represents a total action of several irreversible damage mechanisms, rubber-filler detachment being possibly the most important one in highly loaded elastomers.^2-5 The second process accounts for polymeric internal viscosity and some interfacial phenomena that probably could be treated as interfacial friction of damaged microstructural elements. There are also other dissipative sources of minor importance that will not be considered in this paper.