Elastoplastic quasi-static and Dynamic Mechanical Analysis of Short Glass Fibre-reinforced Bio-based Polyamide through Micromechanical and Experimental Evaluation
Please login to view abstract download link
Short fibre reinforced polymers (SFRP) are used in many industries due to their remarkable mechanical properties, lightweight nature, and cost ratio. One success factor is that SFRP parts can be efficiently manufactured using injection moulding process. However, as that success is based on petrochemicals, substituting fossil-based polymers in components offers great potential for reducing CO2 emissions and making products more sustainable. This work aims to contribute to sustainable engineering by delivering analytical, numerical and experimental methods to analyse the quasi-static tensile and dynamic mechanical (DMA) bending behaviour of the investigated SFRP. A novel bio-based polyamide matrix with 40% glass fibre content and a traditional polyamide with 30% glass fibre reinforcement served for the application and validation of the developed computational methods. An effective micromechanical spring element method (SEM) was developed to homogenize the elastoplastic stress-strain behaviour of SFRP through a low-fidelity representative volume element (RVE). This method employed linear longitudinal fibre and matrix elements, along with quadratic shear matrix elements, to model the mechanics of the SFRP. The plastic flow rule and a sequentially linear iterative solver were implemented to handle the nonlinear analysis of the 1D spring system. Further results include the comparison of the frequency-dependent behaviour of the investigated SFRP materials. Furthermore, it is presented how to efficiently adapt the experimental data for the usage in dynamic finite element analysis using a homogenized material approach. The presented approaches enable an efficient numerical evaluation from experimental data, which helps to consider a more sustainable polymer for quasi-static and dynamic applications during early development stages and contributes to its industrialisation.
