12.4 Conclusions This methodology of subjecting foams to increasingly severe cyclic compressions appears to be effective in extracting both the nonlinear inelastic response of foams under these conditions, but also discriminates their relative effects such that they can be evaluated for performance. This method can and should be used on a range of foam materials to determine the strains at which each begins to display substantial inelastic behavior, and the rate at which these inelastic mechanisms evolve. It is also worth noting that at 50 % compression there appears in most groups to be changes to the peak load capacity beyond the four cycles often employed when evaluating Mullins-type degradation behavior. It is the overall hypothesis of this work that the distinction between blown RTV foams and cast cellular silicone foams will differ substantially in how they evolve their inelastic degradation responses, and though this work did not achieve a direct comparison of these materials, it did establish the method as able to complete the comparison. Further, direct observation of the mechanisms governing compressive degradation have yet to be completed, and the path to this is described in the Future work section. Acknowledgements Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by LANS, LLC, for the NNSA of the US Department of Energy under contract DE-AC52-06NA25396. 106 J. Furmanski et al.
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