A Thermoviscoelastic Approach for Modeling Shape Memory Polymers

This paper presents a thermoviscoelastic model for shape memory polymers (SMPs). The model has been developed based on the hypothesis that structural and stress relaxation are the primary shape memory mechanisms of crosslinked glassy SMP, and that consideration of these mechanisms is essential for predicting the time-dependence of the shape memory response Comparisons with experiments show that the model can reproduce the rate-dependent strain-temperature and stress-strain response of a crosslinked glassy SMP. The model also captures many important features of the temperature and time dependence of the free strain recovery and constrained stress recovery response.