Abstract
The usage of new polymers in fuel tank designs leads to challenges in obtaining the material characteristics for structural simulations. The objective of this study is twofold. The first objective is to validate whether existing material models can correspond with actual polymer data. The second objective is to investigate whether an automation platform can be used to automatically calibrate material data with real life experimental data.
A number of creep and recovery tests on fuel tank samples are carried out to obtain test curves for various loads. For each of these tests a corresponding simulation model is created. This analysis model is put in a framework to automatically vary the material properties and to measure the corresponding error between test and simulation. Once the process is automated the material properties are changed via an optimization algorithm until the simulation data matches with the test data.
Two standard material models are automatically calibrated with the test results. This study proves that the parameters of polymer test data can be modelled with existing material models. Furthermore the parameters of the material models can be automatically obtained in order to correspond with actual material data for different tests.
KEYWORDS – polymer, viscoelastic material calibration, creep analysis, finite element