A Microstructurally Based Orthotropic Hyperelastic Constitutive Law

Abstract

A constitutive model is developed to characterize a general class of polymer and polymer-like materials that displays hyperelastic orthotropic mechanical behavior. The strain energy function is derived from the entropy change associated with the deformation of constituent macromolecules and the strain energy change associated with the deformation of a representative orthotropic unit cell. The ability of this model to predict nonlinear, orthotropic elastic behavior is examined by comparing the theory to experimental results in the literature. Simulations of more complicated boundary value problems are performed using the finite element method.