Experimental identification of material properties of gels

Since the 1950s, hyperelastic materials have become an important engineering material. Because of its deformability, this kind of material is widely used in the vehicles, springs, seals, cushioning pad, couplings and tires of the load structure. With the rapid progress of modern engineering and improving of people’s living standard, it is essential to pay more attention to the durability and security of hyperelastic materials. As a result, it is the key subject to study the experiments of this kind of materials. In recent years, the research about the modelling and experimental identifications of hyperelastic material has become very popular all over the world. A large number of works have been done to develop many methods and founded a variety of models. In this thesis, six different models developed to reproduce the behavior of hyperlastic materials are used to characterize the behavior of three gels. Three different loading conditions are obtained by using a laboratory uniaxial tensile testing machine. The data collected will be used to identify the models parameters for the tested materials.