Investigation of Density- and Strain Rate-dependent Strain Hardening-softening-coupled material Behavior of Polyurethane Foams using Elasto-viscoplastic Constitutive Model

Polyurethane foam (PUF) is one of the most well-known cellular materials and is widely employed in various industrial and biomedical fields thanks to its many advantages. These include mechanical and material characteristics such as low density and thermal conductivity, and high specific elastic modulus and strength. Despite of these advantages, the PUF has extremely complex material nonlinearity, with changes in density and strain rate, which is a major obstacle to material design and the application of PUF-based structures. PUF has elasto-viscoplastic behavior including three stages of material features, linear elasticity, softening/plateau with stress drop and densification. These phenomena depend strongly on strain rate and density. Therefore, in this study, a phenomenological constitutive model, namely, an elasto-viscoplastic model, was proposed to describe the density- and strain rate-dependent material nonlinear behavior of PUF. The yield surface-independent plastic multiplier, and the hardening- and softening-associated internal state variables proposed by Frank and Brockman, and Zairi et al. were adopted in the constitutive model, respectively. The proposed constitutive model was discretized using the implicit time integration algorithm and was implemented into a user-defined subroutine of the commercial finite element analysis program, ABAQUS. At the same time, a deterministic identification method for material parameters of the constitutive model was introduced to predict the precise material response of PUF under arbitrary densities and strain rates. To do this, the three-dimensional constitutive model was contracted to a one-dimensional equation, and the explicit equation for each material parameter was derived. Then, the strain hardening- and softening-dependent material parameters were calculated using experimental results, such as the work hardening rate-stress curve and the yield stress-strain rate curve. After analyzing the obtained material parameters, it was found that the material parameters were strongly dependent on the density and the strain rate. Consequently, the macroscopic material response of PUF, such as a uniaxial compressive stress-strain curve, can be predicted based on the proposed method in this study.