Rubber and Rubber Balloons: Paradigms of Thermodynamics / Edition 1

by Ingo Müller, Peter Strehlow

Overview

Experiments with rubber balloons and rubber sheets have led to surprising observations, some of them hitherto unknown or not previously described in the literature. In balloons, these phenomena are due to the non-monotonic pressure-radius characteristic which makes balloons a subject of interest to physicists engaged in stability studies. Here is a situation in which symmetry breaking and hysteresis may be studied analytically, because the stress-stretch relations of rubber - and its non-convex free energy - can be determined explicitly from the kinetic theory of rubber and from non-linear elasticity. Since rubber elasticity and the elasticity of gases are both entropy-induced, a rubber balloon represents a compromise between the entropic tendency of a gas to expand and the entropic tendency of rubber to contract. Thus rubber and rubber balloons furnish instructive paradigms of thermodynamics. This monograph treats the subject at a level appropriate for post-graduate studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783540202448
Publisher:	Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Publication date:	05/14/2004
Series:	Lecture Notes in Physics , #637
Edition description:	2004
Pages:	123
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.02(d)

Table of Contents

Stability of Two Rubber Balloons.- Kinetic Theory of Rubber.- Non-linear Elasticity.- Biaxial Stretching of a Rubber Membrane.- Stability of a Single Balloon. Stabilization.- Stepwise Inflation of a Balloon.- Inflation and Deflation of Two Balloons. Hysteresis.- Many Balloons. Emergence of a Pseudoelastic Hysteresis.- Crystallization of Rubber.- Historical Notes.

Editorial Reviews

From the reviews:

'...Rubber and Rubber Balloons is an engaging supplement for courses on statistical mechanics or soft condensed matter physics. It provides a simple and familiar setting in which to explore some of the most important ideas of those subjects." (Michael Marder, PHYSICS TODAY, August 2005)

From the Publisher