Prediction of viscoelastic material functions from constant stress- or strain-rate experiments

To predict durability of polymeric structures an information on polymer’s long-term properties in the form of relaxation modulus and/or creep compliance is required. It is well known that determination of relaxation or creep properties from experimental data is an inverse problem, which, due to presence of experimental errors in input data, becomes ill-posed. To find a stable solution using standard integration schemes is practically impossible. In this paper we propose a “hands-on” methodology which bypasses the solution of ill-posed integral equation and allows finding long-term relaxation or creep properties from simple constant strain rate or constant stress-rate experiments performed at different temperatures. The proposed approach can be applied not only for characterization of viscoelastic materials in solid state but can also be used for prediction of time-dependent properties of polymer melts. The paper presents the detailed steps of the proposed method as well as its validation on several simulated and real experimental data. It has been shown that the proposed approach can accurately reconstruct the desired long-term time-dependent properties obtained in traditional way (i.e., from step loading).