Soft Matter at the Thermal Scale, Ch Rubber elasticity, swelling and gelation
Problem
Someone wants to extract the shear modulus of a rubber strip from one tensile measurement. The strip has undeformed cross-sectional area A0=2.0×10−5m2 and is held at a stretch ratio λ=3.0 by a force F=6.0N. Reasoning that the rubber is incompressible, so the deformed area is A(λ)=A0/λ, they compute the true stress σtrue=F/A(λ) and substitute this value directly into the nominal stress-strain law σ=G(λ−λ−2), solving for G. Find the error in this reasoning and give the correctly extracted shear modulus.