Influence of fiber orientation, temperature and relative humidity on the long-term performance of short glass fiber reinforced polyamide 6

As a result of processing of short fiber reinforced thermoplastics, the fiber orientation varies throughout a product giving rise to a pronounced anisotropic mechanical response. Different flow conditions in a product result in spatial variation in both short- and long-term mechanical properties. In this study, a modeling approach is presented to evaluate the lifetime of short fiber reinforced polyamide 6, both in plasticity- and crack growth controlled regions of failure. In the plasticity-controlled region, a viscoplastic model based on separation of the load angle (by means of Hill's equivalent stress formulation) and time dependence of the yield stress is used in the form of an associative flow rule. The influence of temperature and relative humidity on the magnitude of the plastic flow rate is described by using an apparent temperature approach combined with a Ree-Eyring formulation. The depression of the glass transition temperature in the polyamide 6 matrix with increasing amount of absorbed moisture was used to predict the anisotropic deformation kinetics in a humid environment. Similar to the plasticity controlled failure, in slow crack growth controlled failure region the effect of temperature, relative humidity, and load angle on the lifetime under a fatigue load is investigated. The apparent temperature approach could also be successfully applied to predict the slow crack growth failure, while the load angle dependence is shown to scale similar to the plasticity-controlled failure with the Hill's equivalent stress.