Fracture of amorphous polymers: A gradient-damage theory
Name
AA_Polymer_Fracture_JMPS_final.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
20.84 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
4557731969ae71c119bbd117af01d664
Author(s)
Narayan, Sooraj
Anand, Lallit
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Narayan, Sooraj and Anand, Lallit. 2021. "Fracture of amorphous polymers: A gradient-damage theory." Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, 146.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd We have formulated a new gradient-damage theory for the deformation and failure of amorphous polymers. Our theory accounts for inelastic deformation and damage due to crazing, and also due to a network-disentanglement mechanism, with the damage eventually culminating in brittle fracture at small levels of stretch for the former mechanism, or ductile fracture at relatively large levels of stretch for the latter mechanism. Our damage theory depends not only on a damage variable but also its gradient, and this helps to regularize the strain-softening behavior during the damage process to avoid mesh-dependency related issues during finite element simulations. We have numerically implemented our theory in a finite element program, and using this simulation capability we show that the predictions from our theory match (reasonably well) the load–displacement curves – as well as the crack-paths under mixed-mode loading conditions – for polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) as well as polycarbonate (PC) in several technically relevant geometries reported in the literature. The good correspondence of the results from our numerical simulations and available experimental data indicates that our simulation capability should be of practical utility in the design and analysis of structures made from PMMA and PC under largely tensile dominated stress states, the ones that usually control structural failure.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.JMPS.2020.104164
