A visco-elastoplastic constitutive model for large deformation response of polycarbonate over a wide range of strain rates and temperatures

The principal purpose in this paper is to present a combined experimental and analytical study to understand the mechanical behavior of polycarbonate (PC) under a wide range of temperatures (-40 degrees C to 100 degrees C) and strain rates (0.001 up to 5000 s(-1)). Firstly, the experiments were conducted to obtain stress-strain response from low to high rates and temperatures. Then a robust physically consistent rate and temperature-dependent constitutive model is proposed to characterize large deformation mechanical behavior of PC. According to viscoelastic theory, a nonlinear-viscoelastic model is employed to understand the elastic response. Yielding behavior is described via cooperative model. As respect to post-yield regime, it is described by the conflict and interaction between softening and hardening behavior based on the integral-form softening and kinematic hardening model. The proposed constitutive model is successfully validated by the excellent agreement between model prediction and experiment results. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.