Modeling the viscoelastic response of GMT structural components

A glass-mat-reinforced thermoplastic (GMT) composite material has been fabricated from randomly oriented continuous glass fibers embedded in a polypropylene matrix. The mechanical constitution of this composite has been characterized by using a linear viscoelastic micromechanically based material model. This material model has subsequently been implemented to several finite-element computer codes for analysis of structural components fabricated from polypropylene GMT. In this paper several example problems have been studied in order to determine the applicability of this modeling approach to predicting time-dependent deformations due to creep in GMT components. These example problems have been solved by utilizing two commercially available codes: ABAQUS, and ANSYS. Furthermore, results obtained with the codes have been compared to both analytic and experimental results, with varying degrees of success. The paper details these results for each of the example problems considered herein. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.