Experimental-numerical studies of the effect of cell structure on the mechanical properties of polypropylene foams

Xiang-Bu Zeng,Wei Gong,Tuan-Hui Jiang,Chun Zhang,Li He

doi:10.1515/epoly-2020-0060

Abstract

AbstractThe effects of the cell size and distribution on the mechanical properties of polypropylene foam were simulated and analyzed by finite element modeling with ANSYS and supporting experiments. The results show that the reduced cell size and narrow size distribution have beneficial influences on both the tensile and impact strengths. Decreasing the cell size or narrowing the cell size distribution was more effective for increasing the impact strength than the tensile strength in the same case. The relationship between the mechanical properties and cell structure parameters has a good correlation with the theoretical model.

Highlights

Nowadays, microcellular polymer foam materials have attracted much attention due to their advantages such as lightweight, low material usage, high strength-to-weightThis work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0714 Wei Gong et al.microstructure defects and a large number of element models to simulate the material crushing process
The present work is most importantly aimed at studying the stress–strain behavior of PP foams near the cells by 3D finite element modeling with ANSYS and supporting tests and identify the relationship between the mechanical properties and cell structure parameters of PP foams
Zinc oxide (ZnO) and zinc stearate (ZnSt) as chemical blowing agent (CBA) activators were commercially available

Summary

Introduction

Microcellular polymer foam materials have attracted much attention due to their advantages such as lightweight, low material usage, high strength-to-weight. Some researchers [17,18,19,20] have carried out scale finite element simulation to study the quasi-static compressive behavior of porous materials. They provided an effective method to quantitatively and qualitatively simulate the compressive stress of cell materials. The present work is most importantly aimed at studying the stress–strain behavior of PP foams near the cells by 3D finite element modeling with ANSYS and supporting tests and identify the relationship between the mechanical properties and cell structure parameters of PP foams

Materials

Preparation of foamed PP materials

Characterization

Mechanical measurement

Dependence of the mechanical properties on the cell size distribution

Conclusions