Experiment investigation on the effect of heat treatment on metal rubber mechanical properties

The relief annealing was applied to the metal rubber forming process to clear the residual stress in wires and obtain stable mechanical properties. The quasi-static experiments were conducted to study the effect of relief annealing on the metal rubber in both free and precompression conditions. The results show that the stiffness of the metal rubber samples increase by more than 1.5 times after relief annealing while the loss factor change little. For the sample subjected to heat treatment, its stiffness keeps stable in free condition as the operating temperature rising, but increases in the precompression state resulting from the internal thermal expansion stress. The loss factor in both conditions keeps stable with a change less than 10% in the same temperature history. For the samples without heat treatment, the geometric and mechanical properties deviate from the initial values as the temperature rising. So it is concluded that the relief annealing is necessary for the metal rubber to obtain stable geometric and mechanical characteristics in high operating temperature.