International Journal of Applied Mechanics   2016 年 8 卷 5 期

2016.07.01

Air cushion is an important packaging material with admirable cushion property in protecting articles from damage. Polymer membrane in air cushion renders a highly nonlinear elastic and rate dependent mechanical behavior in experimental tensile test. A visco-hyperelastic constitutive model for a polymer membrane of an air cushion is developed by additively decomposing its mechanical response into a hyperelastic portion and a viscoelastic portion. Material parameters are consecutively obtained by matching experimental data of static and dynamic uni-axial tensile tests of the membrane, respectively. Compression test of a single air column of the air cushion is conducted as a means of validation on the proposed constitutive model. By comparing simulation results with experimental data, it is shown that the proposed visco-hyperelastic model can properly characterize the mechanical behavior of the air cushion packaging material. The model can be applied to evaluate cushion performance of air cushions and their optimum design.