| The main objective of this work is to develop an expedient finite element algorithm to perform large strain analysis of rubbers and rubber-like materials which are considered to be incompressible. To this end, a mixed finite element formulation is developed with the hydrostatic pressure and the displacement being independently assumed. A special effort is made to isolate the hydrostatic pressure from the general deformation mode in nonlinear formulation. By doing this, a very efficient iterative solution procedure with a quadratic convergence rate is achieved, particularly for problems deformed in the large strain range. The impact of the proposed algorithm is that one can perform the nonlinear finite element analysis for rubbers with significantly reduced computation time.;Two types of constitutive relations are implemented into a finite element code for computational purpose. They are Mooney/Rivlin's model and Ogden's model. Various numerical tests show that the proposed formulation and the finite element implementation are very reliable and effective for the intended large strain analysis of rubber products.;In the dissertation, it is shown that the finite element formulation for an incompressible material must begin with the consideration of a compressible model. This in turn requires the modification of existing rubber models for the finite element analysis. A general procedure on the modification is outlined in the dissertation. |
