Modeling mechanical response of intumescent mat material at room temperature

Intumescent mat material is widely used to support ceramic substrates in catalytic converters and behaves very much like hyper-foam material under compressive loading. Experiments show that compressive loading curves depend on the ram speed and the number of cycles. The unloading curves show different slopes and paths that depend less on the ram speed and number of cycles. The slopes of the unloading curves decrease as the plastic strain increases; this is referred to as “softening” in this study. The effects of rate, softening, and plastic deformation must be considered to model the mechanical response of intumescent mat material. Finite deformation theory is applied with a multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient tensor. The developed theory is implemented as an implicit finite element algorithm in ABAQUSTM/STANDARD. The necessary material parameters are extracted from experiments. Numerical simulations show good agreement with experiments.