Material Insights by Material Type

Plastics

Material Testing and Calibration Strategies for Material Models of Polymers, Foams, and Composite Materials

The accurate calibration of materials models is crucial for simulating the behavior of materials across various industries, including automotive, aerospace, and consumer goods. With the increasing complexity of modern materials, particularly polymers, foams, and composite materials, developing reliable and efficient calibration strategies is more important than ever. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of calibration strategies for material models applied to these materials, focusing on the challenges and best practices for each material class.

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Comparison of Calibration Strategies for Material Models of Polymers, Foam, and Composite Materials

The accurate calibration of materials models is crucial for simulating the behavior of materials across various industries, including automotive, aerospace, and consumer goods. With the increasing complexity of modern materials, particularly polymers, foams, and composite materials, developing reliable and efficient calibration strategies is more important than ever. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of calibration strategies for material models applied to these materials, focusing on the challenges and best practices for each material class.

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Beyond Standards: Material Testing and Processing for Successful Simulations of Polymeric Materials (LAW76)

Our presentation, “Beyond Standards: Material Testing and Processing for Successful Simulations of Polymeric Materials (LAW76)”, focuses on the Semi-Analytical Model for Polymers (SAMP), a material law developed for simulating complex polymer behavior in industries like automotive and aerospace. SAMP integrates strain-rate dependencies and a damage model for accurate predictions in crash and impact scenarios but faces limitations like slow convergence and the absence of a damage model that incorporates strain-rate and triaxiality dependencies. We emphasize the need to go beyond standardized testing, advocating for tailored tests that better reflect real-world conditions, such as varying strain rates, geometries, and environmental factors. This presentation also details a semi-automated calibration process for SAMP and BIQUAD models using iterative workflows to optimize simulation accuracy for tension, compression, shear, and impact tests. Ultimately, SAMP’s flexibility and predictive accuracy make it a powerful tool, but its successful implementation requires advanced knowledge, customized testing, and careful calibration to ensure stability and reliability in material simulations.

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Non-Isochoric Plasticity Assessment for Accurate Crashworthiness CAE Analysis. Application to SAMP-1 and SAMP-Light.

A deep understanding of advanced material plasticity and fracture is one of the cornerstones of mechanical engineering to overcome present and future challenges in the automotive industry with respect to lightweight multi-material body solutions. The correct material law selection may imply a design lightweight efficiency improvement of between 10% and 20% depending on the material, component geometry, manufacturing technology and performance requirements. The accurate implementation of the plastic behaviour becomes mandatory when material fracture is a central design parameter. In this paper, the authors propose a clear process to experimentally measure and assess how far uniaxially tested materials are from pure isochoric plastic behaviour. This process will be named Non-isochoric Plasticity Assessment (NPA). In order to illustrate the process, NPA will be applied to actual experimental results of representative automotive metals and thermoplastics. Material plastic dilation behaviour is studied. A general description is provided regarding plasticity theory concepts required for the usage of non-isochoric plasticity material laws. An approach for the validation of the experimental input data consistency for both SAMP-1 and SAMP-Light material laws is also proposed. The overall approach is finally applied and validated on an extruded aluminium and a thermoplastic showing a proper level of correlation between CAE and experimental results for shell-based FE-models.

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