A General Temperature-Dependent Stress-Strain Constitutive Model for Polymer-Bonded Composite Materials

An Engineering Prediction Model for Stress Relaxation of Polymer Composites at Multiple Temperatures

This study develops an engineering prediction model for stress relaxation of polymer composites, allowing the prediction of stress relaxation behaviour under a constant strain, over a range of temperatures. The model is based on the basic assumption that in the stress relaxation process the reversible strain is transformed to irreversible strain continuously. A strain-hardening model is proposed to incorporate nonlinear elastic behaviour, and a creep rate model is used to describe the irreversible deformation in the process. By using stress relaxation data at different temperatures, under different strains, the dependence on temperature and initial strain of the model parameters can be established. The effectiveness of the proposed model is verified and validated using three polymer composite materials. The performance of the model is compared with three commonly used stress relaxation models such as the parallel Maxwell and Prony series models. To ease the use of the proposed model in realistic structural problems, a user subroutine is developed, and the stress relaxation of a plate structure example is demonstrated.

A Phenomenological Primary-Secondary-Tertiary Creep Model for Polymer-Bonded Composite Materials

This study develops a unified phenomenological creep model for polymer-bonded composite materials, allowing for predicting the creep behavior in the three creep stages, namely the primary, the secondary, and the tertiary stages under sustained compressive stresses. Creep testing is performed using material specimens under several conditions with a temperature range of 20 °C–50 °C and a compressive stress range of 15 MPa–25 MPa. The testing data reveal that the strain rate–time response exhibits the transient, steady, and unstable stages under each of the testing conditions. A rational function-based creep rate equation is proposed to describe the full creep behavior under each of the testing conditions. By further correlating the resulting model parameters with temperature and stress and developing a Larson–Miller parameter-based rupture time prediction model, a unified phenomenological model is established. An independent validation dataset and third-party testing data are used to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed model. The performance of the proposed model is compared with that of an existing reference model. The verification and comparison results show that the model can describe all the three stages of the creep process, and the proposed model outperforms the reference model by yielding 28.5% smaller root mean squared errors on average.