Development and Experimental Validation of an Advanced Nonlinear, Rate Dependent Constitutive Model for Polyether Ether Ketone (PEEK)

Abstract

Polyether ether ketone (PEEK) has received much attention in orthopedic communities for several decades due to its strength, wear properties, inertness and general biocompatibility. Interest in and use of PEEK is prevalent in established applications, such as joint replacement and fracture fixation and, with the advancement of its use in biomedical textiles, PEEK will grow into other areas such as tissue engineering scaffolds. In all of these applications, PEEK components are subjected to mechanical loads that vary over both short and long time periods. However, few, if any, of the available constitutive models in commercial finite element codes are equipped to adequately capture the time and ratedependent response of PEEK. Here, we have developed and experimentally validated a nonlinear viscoplastic constitutive model for PEEK based on the threenetwork model (TNM).