Abstract
Shrimali and Lopez-Pamies (2023, “The ‘Pure-Shear’ Fracture Test for Viscoelastic Elastomers and Its Revelation on Griffth Fracture,” Extreme Mech. Lett., 58, p. 101944) have recently shown that the Griffith criticality condition that governs crack growth in viscoelastic elastomers can be reduced to a fundamental form that involves exclusively the intrinsic fracture energy Gc of the elastomer, and, in so doing, they have brought resolution to the complete description of the historically elusive notion of critical tearing energy Tc. The purpose of this article—which can be viewed as the third installment of a series—is to make use of this fundamental form to explain one of the most popular fracture tests for probing the growth of cracks in viscoelastic elastomers, the trousers test.
