Determination of mechanical property of synthetic rubber using optical mouse as a vibration sensor

Abstract

Synthetic rubber is an incompressible isotropic hyper-elastic material. Its mechanical property is described only by rigidity modulus at undeformed configuration which is one third of Young's modulus at the same configuration. This paper describes an indirect method to determine its rigidity modulus by measuring the frequency of oscillation of a loaded rubber string. Small superimposed oscillation at static equilibrium stretch is measured with an optical mouse. The obtained data is processed to determine the frequency of oscillation. This process of acquiring data and processing it to obtain the desired information is known as Data Acquisition. Post processing and interpretation of the signal is done with help of MATLAB. The rigidity modulus of synthetic rubber is thus determined