Identification of Nonlinear Viscoelastic Models of Flexible Polyurethane Foam From Uniaxial Compression Data

Flexible polyethylene foam is used in many engineering applications. It exhibits nonlinear and viscoelastic behavior which makes it difficult to model. To date, several models have been developed to characterize the complex behavior of foams. These attempts include the computationally intensive microstructural models to continuum models that capture the macroscale behavior of the foam materials. In this research, a nonlinear viscoelastic model, which is an extension to previously developed models, is proposed and its ability to capture foam response in uniaxial compression is investigated. It is hypothesized that total stress can be decomposed into the sum of a nonlinear elastic component, modeled by a higher-order polynomial, and a nonlinear hereditary type viscoelastic component. System identification procedures were developed to estimate the model parameters using uniaxial cyclic compression data from experiments conducted at six different rates. The estimated model parameters for individual tests were used to develop a model with parameters that are a function of strain rates. The parameter estimation technique was modified to also develop a comprehensive model which captures the uniaxial behavior of all six tests. The performance of this model was compared to that of other nonlinear viscoelastic models.