The role played by viscoelasticity in the bulk material during the propagation of a dynamic crack in elastomers

Investigation of dynamic fracture of elastomers can still be considered to be a relatively open area. When a sheet of elastomer is stretched in a tensile machine and a crack is introduced, the crack propagates at a speed that depends on the initial stretch level. There are instances where this speed is noted to exceed the shear wave speed based on the elastic modulus under high imposed stretches. Such cracks are called transonic cracks. It was usually hypothesized that either the hyperelastic or viscoelastic stiffening of the bulk material raises the wave speeds resulting in crack speeds entering the transonic regime. This article revisits the experiments performed on Polyurethane elastomers in Corre et al. (Int J Fract 224(1):83–100, 2020) to study the implications of both these hypotheses. Crack propagation has not been explicitly modeled, but the crack speeds are implicitly imposed on the geometry using the boundary conditions extracted from the experimental data. It has been determined that the viscoelasticity in the bulk is needed to describe and understand the transonic cracks in polyurethane elastomer. The inclusion of viscoelasticity results in the notions of ‘rubbery’ and ‘glassy’ wave speeds and hence, the transonic regime is defined considering the rubbery wave speed.