Viscoelastic Material Analysis and Creep Test Simulation in Abaqus CAE

Title

Viscoelastic Material Analysis and Creep Test Simulation in Abaqus CAE

One-Sentence Summary

This tutorial demonstrates how to model viscoelastic materials using Prony series in Abaqus CAE by simulating a creep test on an epoxy polymer specimen under constant load over time.

Key Takeaways

• [0:00] Viscoelastic materials combine elastic properties (spring behavior with instantaneous recovery) and viscous properties (dashpot behavior with permanent deformation), requiring combined spring-dashpot models like Maxwell fluid and Kelvin solid models for accurate representation

• [3:37] A creep test applies constant pressure to a specimen and observes increasing strain over time; this requires a Dynamic implicit step in Abaqus (not static) since time-dependent behavior must be captured

• [4:40] Viscoelastic material parameters are defined using Prony series, which relates shear modulus to time and requires inputs of instantaneous shear modulus, relaxation modulus, and relaxation time values (n=4 terms in this example)

• [5:42] Material setup in Abaqus requires defining density, instantaneous Young's modulus (4060.1 MPa), instantaneous Poisson's ratio (0.37), and Prony series coefficients in the mechanical properties section

• [7:48] Simulation settings must include very small time increments (0.01 seconds minimum, up to 10,000 increments) to capture viscoelastic behavior accurately, with automatic time stepping enabled to increase increments when possible

• [8:52] History output requests must be configured to track strain (E11) and displacement (U1) data at specific geometry sets (left end) with output frequency of 1 (every increment) for post-processing

• [11:00] Results show expected creep behavior: instantaneous deformation upon load application followed by non-linear increasing strain that reaches saturation, demonstrating the combined elastic-viscous response of the epoxy material

Suggested Category Tags

• Finite Element Analysis
• Abaqus CAE
• Viscoelastic Materials
• Creep Testing
• Polymer Simulation