Viscoelastic constitutive modeling of creep and stress relaxation in polymers and polymer matrix composites

Abstract: This chapter discusses the basic concepts of viscoelastic behavior of polymers and polymeric composites as well as respective modeling for both the linear and nonlinear behavior. The material is discussed in four main sections. The first discusses creep-recovery and stress relaxation experiments. The second section discusses the concept of linearity in viscoelasticity and a short presentation of the time–temperature, time–stress and time–temperature–stress superposition principles is made. The third section discusses the different linear viscoelastic models, from the basic viscoelastic elements up to the generalized models. Finally, the fourth section discusses the nonlinear viscoelastic behavior of polymers and polymeric composites and different predicting models and methods along with specific applications are presented.