Performance of Nylon Based Polymer Foams at Elevated Temperature under Tensile Loading

Abstract

One of the primary applications of polymer based cellular solids is to act as an energy absorbing material during impact where compressive strain rates may reach 500-800/s. In reality, impacts occur over a wide range of temperatures and velocities at different angles of incidence. Understanding and modelling the behaviour of the polymer foams requires characterisation of the material response in detail. The stress-strain response that covers both compressive and tensile behaviour for a wide range of strain rates and temperatures are needed to characterize the mechanical performance of polymer foams as polymeric foams are highly nonlinear materials that undergo large deformation in crashworthiness related cases. It is reported in literature that any increase or decrease in temperature over the glass transition region can cause changes by order of magnitude in elastic modulus of polymeric foams. However, creation of cross linking at high temperature can affect the elastic modulus. In this work, the behaviour of two, polyamide-6 (PA-6) based closed cell foams at elevated temperatures were investigated covering the glass transition temperature. This work presents the variation of elastic and tangent modulus of two low densities PA-6 and PA-6/polyolefin (Nylon alloy) based foams. Empirical equations have been proposed to allow the prediction of modulus over a temperature range of 23°C to 120°C for these materials.