Study of shear-stiffened elastomers

Shear thickening fluids, which are usually concentrated colloidal suspensions composed of non-aggregating solid particles suspended in fluids, exhibit a marked increase in viscosity beyond a critical shear rate. This increased viscosity is seen as being both 'field-activated', due to the dependence on shearing rate, as well as reversible. Shear thickening fluids have found good applications as protection materials, such as in liquid body armor, vibration absorber or dampers. This research aims to expand the protection material family by developing a novel solid status shear thickening material, called shear-stiffened elastomers. These new shear-stiffened elastomers were fabricated with the mixture of silicone rubber and silicone oil. A total of four SSE samples were fabricated in this study. Their mechanical and rheological properties under both steady-state and dynamic loading conditions were tested with a parallel-plate. The effects of silicone oil composition and angular frequency were summarized. When raising the angular frequency in dynamic shear test, the storage modulus of conventional silicone rubber shows a small increasing trend with the frequency. However, if silicone oil is selected to be mixed with silicone rubber, the storage modulus increases dramatically when the frequency and strain are both beyond the critical values. © 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.