Abstract：It is indicated that the existing elasticity models with strain-stiffening effects for rubbery materials are involved in an issue concerning unbounded strain energy. Toward a solution to this issue, an explicit, straightforward approach is proposed to obtain multi-axial elastic potentials for incompressible rubberlike materials. Such potentials are derived directly from one-dimensional elastic potentials for uniaxial case by means of explicit procedures and, as such, bypass usual tedious numerical calculations in estimating a set of unknown parameters. It is shown that these potentials based solely on uniaxial data may accurately match data of four benchmark tests over the whole stretch range from small to large deformations. Also, they not only can well describe strain-stiffening effects, but can always give rise to bounded strain energy. Numerical examples are presented in fitting Treloar’s classical data.
2015, Vol. 36 
