Finite element implementation of a thermo-damage-viscoelastic constitutive model for hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene composite propellant

A thermo-damage-viscoelastic model for hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) composite propellant with consideration for the effect of temperature was implemented in ABAQUS. The damage evolution law of the model has the same form as the crack growth equation for viscoelastic materials, and only a single damage variable \(S\) is considered. The HTPB propellant was considered as an isotropic material, and the deviatoric and volumetric strain-stress relations are decoupled and described by the bulk and shear relaxation moduli, respectively. The stress update equations were expressed by the principal stresses \(\sigma_{ii}^{R}\) and the rotation tensor \(M\), the Jacobian matrix in the global coordinate system \(J_{ijkl}\) was obtained according to the fourth-order tensor transformation rules. Two models having complex stress states were used to verify the accuracy of the constitutive model. The test results showed good agreement with the strain responses of characteristic points measured by a contactless optical deformation test system, which illustrates that the thermo-damage-viscoelastic model perform well at describing the mechanical properties of an HTPB propellant.