A history of Marc’s advancements and contributions to elastomer engineering

For nearly 5 decades, Marc has been at the forefront of nonlinear FEA technology, developing simulation capabilities in sync with advances in elastomer materials and their use in engineering. Here is a brief timeline of enhancements to Marc as related to elastomer modeling:

1970s

• 1971: Marc, the world's first commercial, nonlinear general-purpose FEA code is released
• 1974: Mooney-Rivlin model and special Herrmann elements to analyze incompressible behavior are introduced
• 1979: Generalized Maxwell model introduced for viscoelastic analysis and to model damping behavior

1980s

• Large-strain viscoelastic capabilities for rubber materials introduced
• Marc pioneers the use of rigid or deformable contact bodies to simplify contact analysis setup. Also, extends the contact FEA capability to 3-D problems

1990s

• Several new material models introduced, including Ogden for slightly compressible elastomers, Rubber foam, Narayanaswamy model for glass relaxation behavior
• Adaptive meshing capability introduced to address convergence problems due to large distortion
• Graphical curve fitting capability to derive material coefficients from test data is implemented to link the testing departments with analysis groups
• Marc solver fully parallelized based on domain composition
• 1995: Marc and Axel Products, Inc. create “Experimental Elastomer Analysis” course
• 1999: Marc is acquired by MSC Software

2000s: Marc introduces:

• New material models of Boyce-Arruda and Gent implemented
• A new framework, based on the updated Lagrangian formulation, is set up for hyperelastic material models. New unified rubber model with improved volumetric behavior is also introduced.
• Automatic global adaptive remeshing extended to rubber materials. General boundary conditions in 3-D are also taken into account during the remeshing process.
• Moment carrying glued contract implemented for load transfer among shells edges, beams and continuum elements. A new general bilinear friction model is introduced, which is more accurate than the model using the velocity-based smoothing function, arc tangent, and less expensive and more general than the stick-slip model 
• Special lower-order triangular and tetrahedral elements to handle incompressible materials, and solid shell element which can be used with elastomeric materials are implemented. Interface elements that are added automatically on crack opening with adaptive meshing are introduced 
• Advances in failure studies include extension of J-integral calculation for rubber applications, Virtual Crack Closure Technique with remeshing to analyze crack growth during the loading, Cohesive zone method (CZM) for delamination, and crack propagation in 2D using global adaptive remeshing
• New solutions like steady state tire rolling, cavity pressure calculation and nonlinear cyclic symmetry , and coupled structural-acoustic model for harmonic analysis to solve seal effectiveness are introduced

2010 and beyond:

• New materials models include:
  • Generalized 5th order Mooney-Rivlin hyperelastic model
  • Bergström-Boyce Viscoelastic Model to analyze rate dependent behavior and frequency dependent damping
  • Anisotropic rubber model to simulate reinforced components
  • Material model based on rheological parallel networks, to model large strain elasticity with viscoelasticity and permanent set
  • Ability to simulate damping as a function of both the frequency and magnitude of excitation
• Parallel solver technology to utilize multi-core processors
• Segment to segment contact
• Beam-to-beam contact and edge contact
• Directionally dependent friction for improved accuracy for reinforced components
• 3-D crack propagation for direct loading and cyclic loading