Modeling the viscoelastic response of GMT structural components

A glass-mat-reinforced thermoplastic (GMT) composite material has been fabr icated from randomly oriented continuous glass fibers embedded in a polypro pylene matrix. The mechanical constitution of this composite has been chara cterized by using a linear viscoelastic micromechanically based material mo del. This material model has subsequently been implemented to several finit e-element computer codes for analysis of structural components fabricated f rom polypropylene GMT. In this paper several example problems have been stu died in order to determine the applicability of this modeling approach to p redicting time-dependent deformations due to creep in GMT components. These example problems have been solved by utilizing two commercially available codes: ABAQUS, and ANSYS. Furthermore, results obtained with the codes have been compared to both analytic and experimental results, with varying degr ees of success. The paper details these results for each of the example pro blems considered herein. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved .