Temperature and strain rate effects on mechanical behavior of a PMMA

In this paper, the mechanical behavior of a PMMA used as the windshield of aircraft was tested. The experiments were finished under two quasi-static strain rates and a high strain rate with the testing temperature from 299K to 373K. The results show that the mechanical property of this PMMA depends heavily on the testing temperature. The Young's modulus and flow stress were found to decrease with increasing temperature at low strain rate. At the strain rate of 10^-1 1/s, strain softening was observed under all experiment temperatures. At high strain rate, with the temperature increasing, the flow stress decreases remarkably while the failure strain increases, and the strain soften was also observed at the temperature above 333K. Comparing the experiments results at same temperature, it was found the flow stress increases with the rising strain rate. The predictions of the mechanical behavior using the ZWT theoretical model have a good agreement with experimental results in the strain range of 8%.