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 G_c of the elastomer and, in so doing, they have brought resolution to the complete description of the historically elusive notion of critical tearing energy T_c. 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.