Researchers solve 100-year-old mystery behind rubber
Rubber seems ordinary until it fails. It holds air in your car tires, seals machinery in power plants, cushions vibration in industrial equipment and keeps garden hoses from dripping. For nearly a century, engineers have relied on reinforced rubber to handle heat, pressure and repeated stress in products that millions of people use without a second thought. Yet one of the most basic questions about it remained unsettled: Why does adding tiny particles to soft rubber make it so much stronger? A team led by University of South Florida engineering professor David Simmons now says it has the clearest answer yet. After running 1,500 molecular dynamics simulations, the researchers found that the main reason reinforced rubber becomes dramatically stiffer is not any single old theory on its own, but a deeper conflict inside the material itself. In simple terms, the rubber is forced to resist a change in volume that it does not want to make. University of South Florida engineering Professor David Simmons. (CREDIT: USF) “How is it that we’ve been using this for …
