Compressive and Bending Behavior of Strip-Shaped Fiber-Reinforced Elastomeric Bearings

Abstract eng:
Multi-layered steel-reinforced elastomeric bearings have widely been used for isolation of structures and machines from vibrations. In an attempt to develop light-weight and low-cost isolators, recent studies have proposed the use of fiber reinforcement in place of steel reinforcement. Although the “rigid” reinforcement assumption is a fairly reasonable assumption in the analysis of a steel-reinforced bearing, it is necessary to include the effect of reinforcement flexibility while studying the compressive or bending behavior of a fiber-reinforced bearing. The main objective of this paper is to study, in detail, the compressive and bending behavior of fiber-reinforced elastomeric bearings by using advanced analytical solutions recently derived by Pinarbasi and Mengi (2008). Free from two of the three fundamental assumptions commonly used in the “pressure” method, these closed-form solutions are valuable tools for a detailed study on behavior of fiber-reinforced bearings under uniform compression or/and pure bending. Analyses conducted on bearings with different geometrical and material properties show that the compressive/bending behavior of a fiber-reinforced bearing can be considerably different than that of its steel-reinforced counterpart. The effect of reinforcement flexibility is very similar to the effect of material compressibility. As expected, the effect of reinforcement flexibility highly depends on the geometrical and material properties of the bearing. Reinforcement flexibility is found to be most effective when the “shape” factor of the bearing is large and Poisson’s ratio of the layer material is close to 0.5.

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