Modelling and computation of curing and damage of thermosets

The curing of thermosets is a complex process involving the transition from a fluid into a (visco-) elastic solid. This phase transition comes along with an increase in stiffness and a volume shrinkage of the polymer. The latter may lead to severe residual strains and stresses, which in turn can cause damage in the final, usually quasi-brittle material. In this contribution a constitutive model is developed which takes into account the curing of a thermosetting material together with the process-induced damage as resulting from curing shrinkage. The curing of the material is governed by a phenomenological hypoelastic constitutive equation which includes temporal evolutions for stiffness and volume shrinkage. Thermal and viscous effects are neglected in the present study. An isotropic gradient-enhanced damage model is adapted to describe the damage evolution. The curing-damage model is implemented into a finite element code and numerical examples for thermosetting materials demonstrate that the proposed model is capable to predict cure-induced damage in thermosets.