Critical Evaluation of a Constitutive Model for Glassy Polycarbonate

Polycarbonate (PC) is an important amorphous glassy polymer whose intrinsic uniaxial response exhibits all the features like strain softening and hardening at large deformations characteristic of this class of materials. Polycarbonate is significantly ductile and is capable of sustaining large plastic deformation. Constitutive models of PC, in order to be useful, should be able to faithfully model its elastic as well as plastic behaviour with as few undetermined parameters as possible. We assess the efficacy of a particular model of glassy polymers by fitting its parameters through usual uniaxial tensile and compressive tests and then using those parameters to model a fracture specimen in 3-dimensions. A range of experimental techniques like digital image correlation, photoelasticity and x-ray tomography are used to make careful quantitative comparisons with computer simulations. Our results indicate that in view of the small scale yielding situation prevalent in PC specimens even at high loads, a faithful prediction of the elastic parameters are sufficient for reproducing most global responses and deformation fields away from the crack. However, to predict fracture initiation, the deformation state within the small but significant fracture process zone needs to be reproduced. This cannot be done unless the entire uniaxial response is modelled to a reasonable degree of accuracy.