Towards an understanding of filled rubbers

Elastomers are used for many industrial and household applications. These synthetic rubbers are most of the time filled with nanoparticles (carbon black or more recently silica in our case) to tune their mechanical properties. The filling of the elastomer improves their mechanical properties but leads to effects which are not fully understood today like the increase of the linear stiffness until one or two magnitudes (low deformations) or a drop in elasticity (medium and high deformations) the so called Payne effect. In this thesis we study these phenomena at different length scales and attempt to relate the microstructure and the macroscopic properties. We will subsequently use several technics to determine the microscopic structure of our samples like TEM tomography or SAXS experiments, to be able to link the macroscopic properties (rheological behavior) to the microscopic structure.