Modeling the moisture dependent material behavior of adhesive bonds close to the glass transition temperature

In the presented work, a viscoelastic cross-linked polyurethane is investigated. Environmental influences lead to an inhomogeneous spatial distribution of the mechanical properties in polymer adhesives. Diffusive transport mechanisms transfer water from the environment into the polymer. Further effects like temperature, also have an influence on the mechanical behavior of adhesives. The model respects these influences and takes the incompressibility of the material into account. Viscoelastic behavior can be observed, especially close to the glass transition temperature [3]. Additional to these general effects on polymers, adhesive bonds show a dependency of the mechanical behavior on the thickness of the layer. For numerical investigations, all necessary balance and constitutive equations are implemented in the open-source C++ finite element code deal.II [1, 2]. With the help of this implementation and by comparing experimental results and results gained from simulations, material parameters of the used polymer can be identified. (© 2014 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)