A Viscoelastic-Plastic Constitutive Model of Shape Memory Polymer

It is of practical significance to develop a constitutive model which is able to predict the thermomechanical behaviors of the shape memory effect occurring in a shape memory polymer (SMP) accurately. The mechanism of shape memory effect of SMP is explained based on the assumption that SMP is composed by two phases, reversible phase and stationary phase. Especially the different flow elements are respectively added to the reversible phase and stationary phase in order to express the plastic behavior of SMP. There are two springs in series, one dashpot and one flow element in the reversible phase. There are two springs in parallel, one dashpot and one flow element in the stationary phase. A constitutive equation is developed to express the thermo-mechanical behaviors of shape memory effect in the SMP based on viscous-elastic mechanics and plastic theory. An internal variable, frozen ratio, is defined to follow the shape memory process in SMP, and the material properties are described as the functions of frozen ratio based on phase transition theorem. The developed constitutive model, which includes above constitutive equation and material parameter functions, is used to numerically simulate the thermo-mechanical behaviors of SMP under various load cycles. Results show that the developed constitutive model can not only predict the shape memory process of SMP accurately, but also express the rate-dependent behaviors of SMP effectively.