Engineering 45 Shear of Rubber Experiment Lab Report Introduction: Rubber has always been an interesting engineering material.

Its elasticity is remarkable, while its use in vehicle tires requires other properties. Although originally a natural product, rubber became so important and in such demand that synthetic rubber was developed with the possibility of having special properties to suit the application. An important loading condition when deforming a material such as rubber is called shear. The strain associated with the tangential loading of shear deforms a body from a square cross-section to a parallelogram. If the body is homogeneous, isotropic, linear and elastic, there will be a constant proportionality between the magnitude of the applied shear stress and the associated shear strain. The shear stress, , is defined by force and area
= f A

where f = shearing load, and A = cross sectional area upon which the load acts. Below is an illustration of the geometric relationship between force and area.

Shear strain, , is defined by the angular shape change of the body. Expressed in radians, the quantity is unitless. For a linear elastic solid, the relationship between shear stress and shear strain is
= G

where G = shear modulus (modulus of rigidity).

Material brass aluminum steel polyethylene

G (ksi) 6000 3900 11500 5 - 6.5

G (Pa) 4.14 X 1010 2.69 X 1010 7.93 X 1010 3.45 X 107 to 4.48 X 107

Material epoxy nylon concrete SiC

G (ksi) 150 - 175 100 - 150 1500 23000

G (Pa) 1.03 X 109 to 1.21 X 109 6.90 X 108 to 1.03 X 109 1.03 X 1010 1.59 X 1011

This experiment concentrates on the shear characteristics of rubber, which is used in antivibration mountings for machinery and the spring suspension of railway carriages. Rubber can withstand large shear deformation, especially in medium and soft grades of the material, which helps to absorb shock loading. Procedure: 1. The rubber shear apparatus consists of a block of medium grade rubber 150 x 75 x 25 mm size which has aluminum alloy strips bonded to the two long edges. One strip has two fixing holes enabling the assembly to be fixed to a rigid vertical surface. The bottom end of the other strip is drilled for a load hanger while the position of the top end is indicated by a small dial gauge. 2. Place the load hanger in position and zero the dial gauge. Add load to the hanger in 10 N increments reading the dial gauge at each load until the travel of the gauge is exceeded. When placing a new load on the hanger, allow 5 minutes for the dial to stabilize. 3. After each load is removed the rubber will not completely recover and the dial reading will not return to the original value. Measure the difference in the original and recovered dial readings and record this as creep.1 Questions to be addressed in the lab report: 1. Record the load and deflection in a table. 2. In Excel (or other graphing software) plot a graph of deflection (y) versus load (x) and draw a best fit regression line through the points. (You may use a calculator, Excel, some other statistical software, or calculate by hand. Be sure to include the equation of the line and the coefficient of determination (R2) on the graph.) This implies a linear load-deformation relationship in the vertical plane. 3. Calculate the shear stress (in Pascals), shear strain (in mm/mm), and the modulus of rigidity (or shear modulus) for each measurement using the following relationships:
G= load and = area deflection = block width

where

Askeland, The Science of Engineering of Materials, 3rd Ed., pp. 489 490.

In your report, represent these values in a table with load, deflection, strain, stress, and modulus of rigidity. Be sure to show sample calculations. 4. Construct a graph of stress (y) versus strain (x) and draw a best fit regression line through the points. Include the equation of the line and the coefficient of determination (R2) on the graph. 5. In order to obtain a single value of the shear modulus, you may average the shear modulus values for each measurement. Compare this observed value to the accepted values on the table on the previous page. 6. Were the results in #2 and #4 linear? Justify your answer. 7. What is the relationship between the regression model and the shear modulus found in #5? 8. Predict the deflection for a 130 N load. What would be the corresponding and ? Show all calculations. 9. Construct a graph of creep (y) versus load (x) and comment on any linear relationship observed.