Inflation of stressed cylindrical tubes: an experimental study

The inflation of an initially stressed cylindrical shell provides a good illustration of the phenomenon of the initiation and propagation of an instability, which shares the same mathematical and mechanical features with a variety of other strain localization phenomena in engineering structures and materials. The high speed CCD camera and digital image processing system were used to measure the 3D shape of the inflated cylindrical tube. The localized bulge of a cylindrical tube with closed ends forms when the internal pressure reaches a critical value Pcr. As more air is filled into the tube, the pressure drops but the radius at the centre of the bulge will increase until it reaches a maximum value rmax. With continued inflation, the pressure stays at a constant value Pp. The purpose of this study is to investigate the critical and propagation pressures in the tubes and the profile outside when the shells under axial tension and internal pressure were inflating. We focus on the influence of the axial tension on the critical pressure. In this paper the problem is explored through experimental efforts. A series of experiments were conducted on commercially available natural rubber latex tubes involving different geometries and initial axial tensions, which were regarded as isotropic, homogeneous, incompressible and hyper-elastic materials.