Tensile Creep of a Long-Fibre Glass Mat Thermoplastic (GMT) Composite. II. Viscoelastic-Viscoplastic Constitutive Modeling

In Part I of this article, the short-term tensile creep of a 3-mm-thick continuous long-fibre glass mat thermoplastic composite was characterized and found to be linear viscoelastic up to 20 MPa. Subsequently, a nonlinear viscoelastic model has been developed for stresses up to 60 MPa for relatively short creep durations. The creep response was also compared with the same composite material having twice the thickness for a lower stress range. Here in Part II, the work has been extended to characterize and model longer term creep and recovery in the 3-mm composite for stresses up to near failure. Long-term creep tests consisting of 1-day loading followed by recovery were carried out in the nonlinear viscoelastic stress range of the material, i.e., 20-80 MPa in increments of 10 MPa. The material exhibited tertiary creep at 80 MPa and hence data up-to 70 MPa has been used for model development. It was found that viscoplastic strains of about 10% of the instantaneous strains were developed under load. Hence, a non-linear viscoelastic-viscoplastic constitutive model has been developed to represent the considerable plastic strains for the long-term tests. Findley's model which is the reduced form of the Schapery non-linear viscoelastic model was found to be sufficient to model the viscoelastic behavior. The viscoplastic strains were modeled using the Zapas and Crissman viscoplastic model. A parameter estimation method which isolates the viscoelastic component from the viscoplastic part of the nonlinear model has been developed. The model predictions were found to be in good agreement with the average experimental curves. POLYM. COMPOS., 30:1204-1211, 2009. (C) 2008 Society of Plastics Engineers