Time-Dependent Mechanical Behaviors of Polyamide 6/Nano-SiO<sub>2</sub> Composite

Abstract

The uniaxial tension under various strain rates, creep under various sustained loads, and equalamplitude- strain loading and unloading tests are carried out at room temperature with polyamide 6/nano- SiO2 composite specimens. According to the elasticity recovery correspondence principle, the recovered elastic stresses (strains) in the case of prescribed strain (stress) history are calculated, and the instantaneous elastic constitutive equations are deduced. The nonlinear viscoelastic constitutive relations in single integral form on the basis of the instantaneous elastic constitutive equations are constructed and applied to model the current stress (strain) responses of polyamide 6/nano-SiO2 composite. The theoretic results agree well with the experimental data, which demonstrates that the single integral constitutive relations used in this work can accurately simulate the physical nonlinear viscoelastic properties of polyamide 6/nano-SiO2 composite. Finally, the creep curve at higher stress level is horizontally shifted along logarithmic timescale using a stress shift factor in terms of the time-stress superposition principle and superposed on that at relative lower stress level to form a master creep compliance curve that spans a longer timescale interval than the short-term test curve does, which suggests that TSSP provides an accelerated characterization method for the long-term creep performance of polyamide 6/nano-SiO2 composite.