Thermo-mechanical coupling applied to plastics

The paper presents an application of thermo-mechanical coupling to thermo-plastics. Specifically, the interaction of mechanical and thermal effects in a polypropylene plastic is studied using numerical simulation. The material properties are such as to make such coupling significant in some industrial applications. Restricting the study to inlinitesimal deformations, the balance laws and axioms of continuum mechanics and thermodynamics are used to determine the response of polypropylene homopolymers to stress, strain and temperature cycling, with the specimen assumed to be in a uniform state of stress/strain/temperature at any instant of time. The numerical experiments are carried out assuming the specimen to be ideally thermally insulated. Predictions from the model are in agreement with preliminary industrial test results. Copyright 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd