Development of Rubber Aging Life Prediction Software

Raw rubber or rubber items are vulnerable to heat, oxygen, light and other factors during the processing, storing or using, due to exposure to the natural environment or a particular working environment, and easy to undergo physical or chemical change, such as the softening, sticky for crude rubber, and cracking, mildewy and brittle for rubber products which would degrade the material properties or even make it unusable. The loss of property caused by such rubber aging is up to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Therefore how to accurately predict the rubber aging life and how to choose the appropriate test method are especially important for the selection of suitable rubber and reduction of the cost of existing aging experiment. Based on the summarizing and comparison of various kinds of rubber fatigue aging theories and experiment methods, a predicting rubber aging life software with VC++ programming language was developed. The software structure mainly included the theoretical prediction module, the commonly used rubber material data module, user guidance module. It could be used to predict rubber fatigue life, optimize the product material and help the manufacturing process more efficient implementation.