The trousers fracture test for viscoelastic elastomers

Shrimali and Lopez-Pamies (2023) have recently shown that the Griffith criticality condition that governs crack growth in viscoelastic elastomers can be reduced to a fundamental form that involves exclusively the intrinsic fracture energy Gc of the elastomer and, in so doing, they have brought resolution to the complete description of the historically elusive notion of critical tearing energy Tc. The purpose of this paper — which can be viewed as the third installment of the series started by Shrimali and Lopez-Pamies (2023) — is to make use of this fundamental form to explain one of the most popular fracture tests for probing the growth of cracks in viscoelastic elastomers, the trousers test.