Engineering rubber bushing stiffness formulas including dynamic amplitude dependence

Sammanfattning: Engineering design models for the torsion and axial dynamic stiffness of carbon black filled rubber bushings in the frequency domain including amplitude dependence are presented. They are founded on a developed material model which is the result of applying a separable elastic, viscoelastic and friction rubber component model to the material level. Moreover, the rubber model is applied to equivalent strains of the strain states inside the torsion or axial deformed bushing previously obtained by the classical linear theory of elasticity, thus yielding equivalent shear moduli which are inserted into analytical formulas for the stiffness. Therefore, unlike other simplified approaches, this procedure includes the Fletcher-Gent effect inside the bushing due to non-homogeneous strain states. The models are implemented in Matlab®. In addition, an experimental verification is carried out on a commercially available bushing thus confirming the accuracy of these models which become a fast engineering tool to design the most suitable rubber bushing to fulfil user requirements. Finally, they can be easily employed in multi-body and finite element simulations