A General Temperature-Dependent Stress–Strain Constitutive Model for Polymer-Bonded Composite Materials

Abstract

This study develops a general temperature-dependent stress–strain constitutive model for polymer-bonded composite materials, allowing for the prediction of deformation behaviors under tension and compression in the testing temperature range. Laboratory testing of the material specimens in uniaxial tension and compression at multiple temperatures ranging from −40 ∘C to 75 ∘C is performed. The testing data reveal that the stress–strain response can be divided into two general regimes, namely, a short elastic part followed by the plastic part; therefore, the Ramberg–Osgood relationship is proposed to build the stress–strain constitutive model at a single temperature. By correlating the model parameters with the corresponding temperature using a response surface, a general temperature-dependent stress–strain constitutive model is established. The effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed model are validated using several independent sets of testing data and third-party data. The performance of the proposed model is compared with an existing reference model. The validation and comparison results show that the proposed model has a lower number of parameters and yields smaller relative errors. The proposed constitutive model is further implemented as a user material routine in a finite element package. A simple structural example using the developed user material is presented and its accuracy is verified.