Effect of temperature on post-yield behavior of PVC foams

Abstract

AbstractExperiments were conducted on Divinycell HCP30 foam to develop equations predicting its elastic and post-yield behavior from − 40 to + 60 °C. In these experiments, the foam was subjected to post-yield cyclic tension, compression and shear and monotonic biaxial tension and compression loading in the environmental chamber of an MTS servo-hydraulic machine. Elastic modulus and yield strength of the foam were found to decrease linearly with increasing temperature and could be expressed by a single equation in terms of room temperature properties. Post-yield behavior involved plasticity, viscoelasticity, and damage. An elastic–plastic viscoelastic damage model was used to predict post-yield behavior of the foam at different temperatures. Temperature dependent plastic hardening and viscoelastic damage functions were extracted from the experimental results and used to simulate elastic and post-yield stress–strain behavior in ABAQUS Explicit using a user-defined material subroutine. The ABAQUS user-defined material was validated with experiments on Divinycell HCP30 foam sheets at various temperatures. Good comparisons were found between ABAQUS and experimental results.