Machine compliance and hardening effects on cavity growth in soft adhesives

Abstract The effect of surface tension on cavity nucleation and growth in an incompressible Neo-Hookean material under dead-loading has been studied previously (Dollhofer et al., Int J Sol Struct , 2004; 41: 6111–27). The above work is extended to include machine compliance and material hardening effects on cavity growth in soft adhesives in this paper. The equilibrium cavity stretch is found both by solving the field equations and by the energy approach. It is shown that the equilibrium cavity stretch is determined by three dimensionless parameters for the dead-loading case and four parameters for the finite compliance case for the Neo-Hookean material. For the Mooney–Rivlin material, one additional dimensionless parameter is needed.