Hyperelasticity and Viscoelasticity in Abaqus 16/09/21, 9:11 a. m.

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Posted by Paul Bolcos on Sep 13, 2021 5:04:49 PM
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In this blog I thought we could do a small dive into hyper- and viscoelastic
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materials and how to model these in Abaqus. Many elastomers, rubbers and
biological soft tissues exhibit such behaviors.
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Introduction
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Hyperelastic materials, are materials that respond elastically even when - Please Select -
they are subjected to large deformations. They have a highly non-linear
stress-strain relation and are nearly incompressible (the shape may change,
but overall volume is constant). Subscribe

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Figure 1. Example of hyperelastic material response compared to a linear Tips, Tricks & Approaches (30)
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Viscoelastic materials, one the other hand, exhibit both viscous and elastic
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characteristics when undergoing deformation. Some polymers, wood and in
particular human tissue have a viscoelastic response. For instance, creep
(Figure 2 - left) means that under a constant stress (force), the strain Recent Posts
(deformation) in the material will increase with time. Similarly, stress- Hyperelasticity and Viscoelasticity
relaxation (Figure 2 - right) means that if the strain (deformation) is kept in Abaqus
constant, the stress (force) response will decrease in time. Save the date for SIMIF | 24th
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These two material responses can be model using Abaqus. So let's look at
Converting Engineering Stress-
how to do this by considering an example. A typical syringe has three main

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Hyperelasticity and Viscoelasticity in Abaqus 16/09/21, 9:11 a. m.

components: the plunger, the barrel and the needle (Figure 3). One end of Strain to True Stress-Strain in
the plunger is capped with a rubber seal. So, how would we model this Abaqus
rubber cap if the material had hyper- and viscoelastic material properties. How to submit and monitor
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Figure 3. Parts of a typical syringe.

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GrabCad has a nice syringe CAD model in Solidworks. After some

defeaturing, the geometry was imported in Abaqus. We have the plunger
(red), rubber (white) and the barrel (red). In this example we used a hex
mesh for all instances and chose the mesh density so that the results are
obtained in reasonable amount of time, while still being dense enough to
make the results sensible. C3D8RH element were used. Hybrid elements
are needed when modelling incompressible (v=0.5) or nearly incompressible
(v=0.475) material behavior.

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Hyperelasticity and Viscoelasticity in Abaqus 16/09/21, 9:11 a. m.

Figure 4. Syringe geometry imported from Solidworks.

Material properties
In terms of material properties, the plunger and barrel were a generic
polypropylene, with isotropic elastic material properties from SolidWorks
database. The rubber was modelled as a hyper- viscoelastic material.
Abaqus has a two main options for considering this: 1) directly specifying
the coefficients, in case the response can taken from literature, and 2) we
can use test data and Abaqus will evaluate which material model best
matches the test data (Figure 5). Please check our previous blog for more
details here.

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Hyperelasticity and Viscoelasticity in Abaqus 16/09/21, 9:11 a. m.

Figure 5. Material evaluation options in Abaqus.

In this case, we had coefficients from a previous workshop. The rubber end
was modelled as a neo-hookean material (C10=200, d1=0), with the

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Hyperelasticity and Viscoelasticity in Abaqus 16/09/21, 9:11 a. m.

viscoelastic behavior specified using a Prony series.

Figure 6. Prony series coefficients.

Interactions
First we defined a general contact with a Friction coefficient of 0.8 and
"hard" pressure-overclosure. The general contact algorithm resolves initial
overclosures using strain-free adjustments by defaults. In this example, it is
more sensible to treat initial overclosures as interference fits, assuming the
rubber end is tightly fitted into the tube.

Steps, loads and boundary conditions.

The analysis was carried out in 3 steps:
1. A static general step called "Step 1 - Interference fit" was defined with a
duration of 1e-6 and an initial increment size 1e-7. In this step, we only
resolve the initial interference fit.
2. A static general step "Step 2- Compression" was defined. The duration
and increment size was the same as in 1. Here, we Encastered the left
part of the syringe tube. We defined a reference point and coupled it to
the end of the plunger. We applied a displacement to this point. An
overview of this is shown below.
3. A visco procedure, "Step 3- Relaxation", was created. The time period
was 50s and initial increment size was 0.1. The viscoelastic strain error
rate tolerance was also 0.1. This step will calculate the stress relaxation
of the rubber in 50s.

The very small step size in 1 and 2 are required since the visco procedure
uses total time (not step time) to calculate time-dependent material
properties. Additionally, the viscoelastic material properties are only
considered in Visco, Coupled temp-disp and Dynamic procedures. Default
History and Field Output requests were used.

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Hyperelasticity and Viscoelasticity in Abaqus 16/09/21, 9:11 a. m.

Figure 7. Boundary conditions and interactions.

Results
Interference fit
In this step, the initial overclosures between the rubber and the plunger and
between the rubber and the barrel are gradually removed (Figure 8)

Figure 8. Interference fit animation.

Compression
The animation in Figure 8 shows the plunger and rubber displacement. Note
that only at the end of the step the stresses become apparent on both the
plunger itself and the rubber.

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Hyperelasticity and Viscoelasticity in Abaqus 16/09/21, 9:11 a. m.

Figure 9. Compression animation.

However, during the entire step, there are some small stresses on the
rubber end as a result of the friction between it and the syringe barrel.
These become apparent if the last frame is excluded from the animation.

Figure 10. Compression animation on rubber end, with the final frame.

Stress-relaxation
In this step, we can gradually see a reduction in the peak stresses due to
viscoelastic effects.

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Hyperelasticity and Viscoelasticity in Abaqus 16/09/21, 9:11 a. m.

Figure 11. Animation for stress-relaxation. The time history is time-based

rather than the default frame-based option.

Discussion
We've shown how to consider hyper- and viscoelastic materials in Abaqus
and what their effect is. There are a few things that need some further
discussion.

Some may be wondering why consider the interference fit in an additional

step and not combine it with the compression. Typically, the interference fit
is resolved in the first increment by default. However, in some cases this
may not be possible and the analysis may fail or have very large cutbacks. If
a separate step is used, then these overclosures may be gradually resolved
over multiple increments.

Unfortunately, hyper and viscoelastic properties for specific materials are not
easily obtainable from web sources (i.e. MatWeb) and testing is required.
The hyperelastic material, the quality of the results depends on the test data
provided, so it is imperative to obtain experimental test data from multiple
tests, such as: uniaxial, equibiaxial, planar and volumetric test. If the
component is loaded mainly in compression, it is important that the test data
has compressive loading, rather than tensile. Finally, the automatic
evaluation of the material models gives some stability limit information, that
should not be exceeded. A similar case could be made for the viscoelastic
material properties derived from test data.

If you want to find out more about modelling hyper and viscoelastic

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materials, do check out our upcoming training.

Register for our Online Training:

Modelling Rubber and Viscoelasticity
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Topics: Rubber, hyperelastics, viscoelasticity

Kondalarayudu soma
16/9/2021 06:45:09

interested to know the main difference between metals and rubber

material

Reply to Kondalarayudu soma

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