Modeling the Viscoelastic Behavior of Amorphous Shape Memory Polymers at an Elevated Temperature

Shape memory polymers (SMPs) are soft active materials, their special property is the ability to hold a temporary shape and when exposed to a suitable trigger, they come back to their original shape. These external stimuli can be temperature, light or electro-magnetic fields. Amorphous SMPs are a class of thermally-activated SMPs that rely on glass transition to retain their temporary shape. Above the glass transition temperature (T > Tg), (amorphous SMPs exhibit finite deformation and viscoelastic behavior. In this work we develop a model to capture the viscoelastic behavior of the amorphous SMPs at elevated temperatures. The model uses an approach that was initially developed to study non-Newtonian viscoelastic fluids. We accomplish this by developing a multi-branch model based on the theory of multiple natural configurations using the maximization of the rate dissipation to determine the evolution of the natural configurations. We apply our model to study several different deformations at an elevated temperature T = 130 °C and show that this approach is able to capture the viscoelastic behavior of these polymers. The predictions of the theory are then compared with experimental results.