A Phenomenological Thermal-Mechanical Viscoelastic Constitutive Modeling for Polypropylene Wood Composites

This paper presents a phenomenological thermal-mechanical viscoelastic constitutive modeling for polypropylene wood composites. Polypropylene (PP) wood composite specimens are compressed at strain rates from 10−4 to 10−2 s−1 and at temperature of , , and , respectively. The mechanical responses are shown to be sensitive both to strain rate and to temperature. Based on the Maxwell viscoelastic model, a nonlinear thermal-mechanical viscoelastic constitutive model is developed for the PP wood composite by decoupling the effect of temperature with that of the strain rate. Corresponding viscoelastic parameters are obtained through curve fitting with experimental data. Then the model is used to simulate thermal compression of the PP wood composite. The predicted theoretical results coincide quite well with experimental data. The proposed constitutive model is then applied to the thermoforming simulation of an automobile interior part with the PP wood composites.