Mechanical behavior of glass fiber-reinforced bosses: experiments and FE simulations

Abstract

This paper, on the one, reports experimental data on injection molded polyamide 6 boss reinforced with 30 wt% of short glass fibers (PA6 GF30), on the other, presents an FE modelling technique for modeling viscoplastic material response. Before the tests all the specimens were conditioned to a moisture content of 1 wt%. The water concentration in the material was checked by weighting. All the mechanical tests have been carried out in compression mode (compression test, compression loading-unloading test, cyclic compression loading-unloading test, compression loading-relaxation-unloading-recovery test) by using a Zwick 1454 type tensile tester equipped with a temperature controlled chamber. The fiber orientation and the strain distribution in the boss was investigated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and optical grating technique. The modeling technique presented is based on the overlay method and the generalized Maxwell model. In order to take plastic deformations into consideration the linear viscoelast ic Maxwell-model was generalized to viscoplasticity by replacing the linear spring with an ``elastic-plastic´´ spring. The applicability of the model was proved by finite element simulation.