A Uniform Viscoelastic-Plastic Constitutive Model for MD-PMMA at a Wide Temperature Range

The deformation characteristics of MD-PMMA vary greatly at different temperatures. In the paper, whether a uniform model could be used to describe these complex characteristics was discussed. Tensile properties of MD-PMMA at the temperatures of -50EsC, -25EsC, 20EsC, 60EsC, 90EsC were experimentally investigated. The entire deformation processes of PMMA were divided into four stages: elastic stage, viscoelastic stage, yielding stage and post-yielding stage. Strain softening and strain hardening phenomenon occurred in the yielding and post-yielding stage, it was the results of the competition between loading rate and plastic strain rate. A nonlinear model of activation dashpot was constructed, in the model, the evolution rate of plastic deformation was defined by Eyring’s theory, and the actual stress was the difference between external applied stress and internal resistance stress caused by plastic strain. The above activation dashpot serially connected with the standard linear model (SLM) to identify elastic and viscoelastic characteristics. A two iterations integral algorithm was proposed to simplify the inter-coupling between the internal stress and the plastic strain, and the unknown parameters in the model could be easily fitted by the experimental data. This uniform viscoelastic-plastic model was demonstrated that could predict different deformation behaviors at a wide temperature range.