An elasto-visco-plastic constitutive model of polypropylene incorporating craze damage behavior and its validation

An elasto-visco-plastic constitutive model incorporating the craze damage behavior was developed for the polypropylene (PP), by using the plastic failure model applied for the concrete, to capture the craze yielding and stress-whitening phenomena. In addition, the developed constitutive model was implemented into finite element codes in Abaqus to simulate the tensile deformation.The standard uniaxial tensile tests were carried out. The stress-strain curves from the uniaxial tensile tests show that the stress keeps decreasing after yielding and the yield stress rises with the increasing of the strain rate. It is worth noting that the craze damage is more visible with higher strain rate. The stress-whitening can be seen clearly around the fracture. The uniaxial tensile tests using specially designed specimen with circular holes weakening were performed for the validation of the developed model. The simulation results of the tensile deformation of the hole-weakened specimen suggest that the stress-whitening could be attributed to the equivalent visco-plastic strain. By comparing between the simulation analysis and the experimental results, the proposed model can describe the stress whitening phenomenon with good accuracy.