Study of self-heating and local strain rate in polyamide-6 and short fibre glass/polyamide-6 under tension through synchronised full-field strain and temperature measurements

This paper studies thermomechanical coupling during room-temperature tensile testing of polyamide-6 (PA6) and 50 wt% short glass fibre/PA6. The tests were performed for different fibre angles (0°, 45°, 90°), moisture contents (dry, 50%RH), and strain rates (10^(-4), 10^(-2), 10^(-1) s^(-1)). Digital image correlation (DIC) was coupled with infrared thermography. The contribution of the local strains, strain rates and temperatures to the global mechanical behaviour was investigated throughout deformation. The initial thermoelastic response was used to estimate the coefficient of thermal expansion. In PA6, neck development caused significant self-heating at high strain rates, differently between dry and 50%RH. In glass/PA6, however, temperature rises were always small (< +3 °C) despite local strain rate peaks in the fracture zone. This was ascribed to limited plastic deformation, as confirmed by post-mortem microscopy. The full-field data can be highly valuable for the development of advanced constitutive models for both pure polymer and short fibre composite.