Direct determination of multi-axial elastic potentials for incompressible elastomeric solids: an accurate,explicit approach based on rational interpolation

With a novel approach based on certain logarithmic invariants, we demonstrate that a multi-axial elastic potential for incompressible, isotropic rubber-like materials may be obtained directly from two one-dimensional elastic potentials for uniaxial case and simple shear case, in a sense of exactly matching finite strain data for four benchmark tests, including uniaxial extension, simple shear, bi-axial extension, and plane-strain extension. As such, determination of multi-axial elastic potentials may be reduced to that of two one-dimensional elastic potentials. We further demonstrate that the latter two may be obtained by means of rational interpolating procedures for uniaxial data and shear data displaying strain-stiffening effects. Numerical examples are presented in fitting Treloar’s data and other data.