Abstract
As industrial use of polymers increases, it becomes more important to take the viscoelastic properties into account, particularly, in structural and mechanical design including such kind of materials. Many engineers and students are, however, not so familiar to treatment of viscoelastic bodies which shows complicated time and temperature dependent behaviors. Thus, the stress and strain analysis of these types of body could easily be misoriented, because of lack in fundamental knowledge on mechanics of viscoelastic body.
The author would like to discuss and explain here about the basic concept on a homogeneous, isotropic and linearly viscoelastic body, and its treatment in the two and/or three dimensional analyses. The following items are emphasized here, as
1) basic equations necessary for stress and displacement analysis of a linearly viscoelastic body under isothermal condition, such as the constitutive, the equilibrium and the compatibility equations, are derived for general type of three dimension.
2) In particular, taking usefulness and convenience in usual treatment two dimensional cases, namely, the plane strain and the plane stress problems, are discussed in detail.
3) The correspondence principle and its application to some example problems in pseudo-elastic analysis of linearly visocelastic problem, are also described with the limitations for application.
4) The basic equations for anisothermal cases are also discussed briefly.
