Abstract
The nonlinear deformation and fracture of RTM6 epoxy resin is characterized as a function of strain rate and temperature under various loading conditions involving uniaxial tension, notched tension, uniaxial compression, torsion, and shear. The parameters of the hardening law depend on the strain-rate and temperature. The pressure-dependency and hardening law, as well as four different phenomenological failure criteria, are identified using a subset of the experimental results. Detailed fractography analysis provides insight into the competition between shear yielding and maximum principal stress driven brittle failure. The constitutive model and a stress-triaxiality dependent effective plastic strain based failure criterion are readily introduced in the standard version of Abaqus, without the need for coding user subroutines, and can thus be directly used as an input in multi-scale modeling of fibre-reinforced composite material. The model is successfully validated against data not used for the identification and through the full simulation of the crack propagation process in the V-notched beam shear test.
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Acknowledgements
The work was funded by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique through the FNRS doctoral fellowship of Xavier Morelle and the FRIA doctoral fellowship of Jérémy Chevalier. The authors are grateful to Maxime Melchior and Laurence Brassart for fruitful discussions and thank Alban Maton for his precious help with the machining of the numerous test samples.
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Morelle, X.P., Chevalier, J., Bailly, C. et al. Mechanical characterization and modeling of the deformation and failure of the highly crosslinked RTM6 epoxy resin. Mech Time-Depend Mater 21, 419–454 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11043-016-9336-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11043-016-9336-6