This study develops an engineering prediction model for stress relaxation of polymer composites, allowing the prediction of stress relaxation behaviour under a constant strain, over a range of temperatures. The model is based on the basic assumption that in the stress relaxation process the reversible strain is transformed to irreversible strain continuously. A strain-hardening model is proposed to incorporate nonlinear elastic behaviour, and a creep rate model is used to describe the irreversible deformation in the process. By using stress relaxation data at different temperatures, under different strains, the dependence on temperature and initial strain of the model parameters can be established. The effectiveness of the proposed model is verified and validated using three polymer composite materials. The performance of the model is compared with three commonly used stress relaxation models such as the parallel Maxwell and Prony series models. To ease the use of the proposed model in realistic structural problems, a user subroutine is developed, and the stress relaxation of a plate structure example is demonstrated.
Keywords: analytical modelling; polymer-matrix composites (PMCs); stress relaxation.