Constitutive relations of strain, anisotropic degradation, and fracture of filled polymer materials in prevailing-tension processes with varying axis direction and relaxations

Abstract

In the course of monotone uniaxial tension, filled polymer materials quasi-isotropic in the initial state experience increasing structure fractures (local adhesive separation and cohesive tearing) whose directions are mainly perpendicular to the tension axis. After complete unloading and relaxation, the fracture lips close, and weaker secondary bonds are formed between them. Taking into account the anisotropy of the above-described process of deterioration of the material structure and mechanical properties (degradation), we suggest to characterize the state of each elementary material fiber by its own values of the structure parameters (damage, fracture, and maximum strain), which can be calculated (according to the model equations of uniaxial tension in a constant direction) from the effective strain history of the fiber. It is determined as the product of the current values of two factors, namely, the strain intensity and the influence function, whose argument is the angle between the directions of the fiber under study and the maximum principal strain. The form of the influence function depends on the material and reflects the degree of anisotropy of the damage arising in it. As a model of uniaxial tension in a constant direction, we use the earlier-proposed version of the nonlinear endochronic theory of ageing viscoelastic materials, which, in addition, contains the secondary bond parameter (with its own equation). We show how the proposed constitutive relations permit one to describe the decrease in the resistance and the ultimate strain during the second axial tension compared with a similar tension from the initial state and to determine the dependence of these effects on the angle between the directions of the preliminary and repeated tensions.