Effective thermo-viscoelastic behavior of short fiber reinforced thermo-rheologically simple polymers: An application to high temperature fiber reinforced additive manufacturing

Abstract

This paper presents a procedure for the estimation of the effective thermo-viscoelastic behavior in fiber-reinforced polymer filaments used in high temperature fiber-reinforced additive manufacturing (HT-FRAM). The filament is an amorphous polymer matrix (PEI) reinforced with elastic short glass fibers treated as a single polymer composite (SPC) holding the assumption of thermo-rheologically simple matrix. Effective thermo-viscoelastic behavior is obtained by implementing mean-field homogenization schemes through the extension of the correspondence principle to continuous variations of temperature by using the time–temperature superposition principle and the internal time technique. The state of the fibers in the composite is described through the use of probability distribution functions. Explicit forms of the effective properties are obtained from an identification step, ensuring the same mathematical structure as the matrix behavior. The benchmark simulations are predictions of residual stress resulting from the cooling of the representative elementary volumes (REVs) characterizing the composite filament. The computation of the averaged stress in the benchmarking examples is achieved by solving numerically the stress–strain problem via the internal variables’ framework. Reference solutions are obtained from Fast Fourier Transform based full-field homogenization simulations. A comparative analysis is performed, showing the reliability of the proposed homogenization procedure to predict residual stress against extensive computations of the macroscopic behavior of a given microstructure.