Abstract
Recently many kinds of polymeric solid material are used in industrial fields. And it is well known that the mechanical properties of such materials show remarkable dependences on time and temperature. So small number of people, however, seem to be familiar with the viscoelastic and/ or the time and temperature dependent mechanical behaviors of these materials.
For students who have just interested in the time dependent characteristics and mechanical behaviors of such kind of polymers, the author would like to explain following items in detail here.
① a fundamental concept on the linearly viscoelastic mechanical behavior under uniaxial stress-strain state, and its mathematical representation in both the differential equation based on the spring-dashpot model and the integral form due to the supereposition principle,
② useful experimental methods for characterization of mechanical properties of solid polymers, and
③ its approximation to numerical functions by the collocation method using a Prony series and the internal transformation of the characteristic functions.
