CONCURRENTLY COUPLED MULTI-SCALE MODELING TO PREDICT PROPERTIES OF THERMOPLASTIC NANOCOMPOSITES
Recent mechanical characterization experiments) with pultruded E-Glass/polypropylene (PP) composite samples with 3 weight％ nanoclay and baseline PP (polymer without nanoclay) indicated significant improvements in compressive strength (～100％) and shear strength (~60％) in modified pultruded PP nanocomposites,in comparison with baseline properties. While the synergistic reinforcing influence of nanoparticle reinforcement is obvious, a simple rule-of-mixtures approach fails to quantify the dramatic increase in mechanical properties. Consequently, there is an immediate need to investigate and understand the mechanisms at the nanoscale that are responsible for such unprecedented strength enhancements. It is envisioned that a better understanding of the mechanisms at the nanoscale will lead to optimization of materials processing variables at the macroscale, which in turn will lead to the manufacture of nanocomposites more efficiently and at lower cost. In this paper, an innovative and efficient method to model nano-structured components in a thermoplastic composite is proposed by employing a large-deformation hyperelastic constitutive model. Effort is directed toward finding fundamental answers to the reasons for significant changes in mechanical properties of nanoparticle-reinforced thermoplastic composites, and then using this knowledge to optimize processing variables to further enhance the targeted properties of the nanocomposite. The proposed method involves a concurrent simulations approach in which the information from molecular dynamics (MD) is seamlessly exchanged with continuum mechanics based method called the Embedded Statistical Coupling Method (ESCM) ,as introduced in Saether et al).
meshless method molecular dynamics nano composites statistical coupling
Abilash Nair Samit Roy
Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics, University of Alabama, AL 35487 USA
国际会议
广州
英文
90-97
2010-12-17（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）