Special issue editorial: Elastomers

Elastomers are used in a wide range of applications such as car tires, adhesives, and sealants among others. Further advancements in optimizing their mechanical and thermal properties in the recent years have also led to the use of elastomers in new area such as electronics and biomedical devices. Therefore, performing research on different properties of elastomers is of fundamental importance due to their wide variety of uses and the high industrial interest.

A significant leap forward in the commercial use of elastomers has been made with the inclusion of inorganic and organic nanofillers, such as silica and carbon black in car tires, which has been shown to improve significantly mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties of the material. The interested reader is referred to the excellent review article by Kumar et al. (1) and the references therein for more details. Despite extensive research efforts over the last 25 years, there are still important questions that remain to be addressed such as how the dispersion state of fillers can be controlled by the material chemistry, what is the optimum dispersion state (well dispersed or fractal percolating structure) for different material performance, what is the effect of filler properties (e.g., size, shape, etc.), what is the influence of processing parameters, and how chemistry of the filler-polymer interface influences the overall filler dispersion and thermomechanical properties of the material. Therefore, it would be very timely to have a special issue to address some of the scientific challenges in this field.

The selected papers for this special issue are discussing the latest research in the field of elastomers using experimental, theoretical, and computational methods. The effect of filler-polymer interface on the NP morphology has been investigated by Schneider et al. (2) and Gundlach et al. (3) by means of small-angle X-ray scattering experiments and Monte Carlo simulations, respectively. Fourier-transform rheology has been used by Nie et al. (4) to explore the effect of silane concentration on the linear and nonlinear rheological properties of a silica filled styrene–butadiene rubber. A very interesting contribution by R. Hentschke (5) bridges the molecular and the macroscopic properties of filled elastomers by combining molecular simulations and analytical modeling. The effect of reinforcing resin on mechanical properties of a carbon black filled isoprene rubber is discussed by Syed et al. (6) using transmission electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy. Regarding sealing applications of elastomers, the extrusion damage of an O-Ring seal is addressed by Windslow and Busfield (7) using a finite element analysis simulation in combination with compression creep tests, and in relation to use of elastomers in electronic devices, Zou et al. (8) study the effect of introducing three-dimensional alumina network into silicone rubber on thermal conductivity and tensile strength of the material. Last but not least, Kumar and Sarangi (9) have discussed instability in dielectric elastomer actuators by proposing a new material model for analyzing dielectric elastomers from an entropic stand-point and comparing the results with energy-based deformation approaches and experimental data.

As the guest editor, I would like to thank all the authors for their high-quality contributions, and the referees for critically evaluating the papers within a short period of time. I also wish to thank Prof. Florian Müller-Plathe for giving me the great opportunity to organize this special issue. I hope the reader will share my joy and find this special issue very useful.