Material behaviour of polymers under impact loading

The intention of this paper is to give a comparative review of material models for polymers with special focus on crashworthiness analysis. An outline of polymers classified as incompressible elastomers, compressible foams and thermoplastics is shown. Elastomers and recoverable foams are based on the same theoretical description: hyperelasticity. We present a material law that allows fast generation of input data based on uniaxial static and dynamic tensile tests at different strain rates. For thermoplastics, we give a short overview of suitable material laws and show how we can characterize approximately their behaviour by using metal plasticity. Using pedestrian protection as an example, we demonstrate some typical applications of polymer modelling in crash simulation. Furthermore, we investigate the deformation behaviour of a Hardy disk during a frontal offset impact.