Analysis of Laminated Rubber Bearings with a Numerical Reduction Model Method

In this paper, we present a reduction method for modeling slender laminated elastomeric structures, which is developed in the context of nearly incompressible hyperelasticity. This method, based on a finite element formulation, consists in projecting the unknown fields onto a polynomial basis in order to reduce the dimension of the problem and the model size. Two types of finite elements are used, one for plane-strain and the other for 3D structures. Comparisons with classical finite element models on single layers show the reliability of the present method. The method proposed successfully predicts the global and local behavior and since it reduces both the model size and the computing time. It can be used to model slender bearing consisting of several layers.