Creep and recovery of nonlinear viscoelastic materials of the differential type

In this work, the creep and recovery properties of rubberlike viscoelastic materials in simple shear are studied by two special constitutive equations for isotropic, nonlinear incompressible viscoelastic material of the differential type. The creep and recovery processes are of significant importance to both the mechanics analysis and engineering applications. The constitutive equations introduced in this work generalize the Voigt-Kelvin solid and the 3-parameter model of classical linear viscoelasticity. They describe the uncoupled non-Newtonian viscous and nonlinear elastic response of an isotropic, incompressible material. The creep and recovery processes are treated for simple shear deformation superimposed on a longitudinal static stretch. Closed form solutions are provided and both processes are described effectively by the exponential function.