Thermomechanical constitutive behaviour of 3D printed biomimetic polymer material under high strain rates

Abstract

With the continuous technical breakthroughs of flexible electronics, materials with outstanding application potential are constantly being designed and optimized. Biomimetic polymer materials are particularly appealing due to their versatility and ease of fabrication, but their mechanical reliability, particularly their thermomechanical constitutive behaviour under extreme working loads, remains unclear. In this paper, the impact responses of a 3D printed biomimetic polymer material named “Tangoblack” are investigated under thermomechanical, focusing on the effect of strain rate. By adjusting the pressure of the gas gun in the split Hopkinson pressure bar, different strain rates are achieved, while the high temperature of the tested sample can be controlled using a heating furnace integrated into the experiment system. Materials for pulse shapers are carefully selected to ensure longer durations at nearly constant strain rates. The constitutive behaviour of the biomimetic polymer material is further investigated under a wide strain rate range from 958 s−1 to 2158 s−1 and three different temperatures (20 °C, 70 °C and 120 °C). The results demonstrate a significant dependence of the polymer material on both strain rate and temperature. A rapid increase in forming strain rate enhances the strain hardening process, while simultaneously revealing a substantial temperature softening effect. Then, an improved nonlinear thermoviscoelastic ZWT constitutive model is proposed utilizing the Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann equation and implemented as a user-defined material model in ABAQUS/Explicit. The proposed constitutive model is demonstrated to be distinctly advantageous, which suggests a novel pathway for describing the mechanical reliability of biomimetic polymer materials under extreme working conditions.