Study on a Rheological Constitutive Model with Yield and Aging Effects for Polyethylene Gas Pipes

Constitutive models and deformation behaviors for polymer materials have long been complex and are always a hot research focus. As a typical semi-crystalline polymer, polyethylene (PE) gas pipes exhibit pronounced nonlinearity, strain dependence, and time dependence during long-term service. Simple material models fail to capture the scale-dependent characteristics of the PE pipes, resulting in difficulties in accurately describing and simulating their deformation and damage behavior. Currently, some PE gas pipes have entered the mid-to-late stages of service life, so it is necessary to propose a constitutive model representing their complex mechanical behavior for simulation and performance evaluation purposes. Based on results from aging tests, tensile tests, differential scanning calorimetry, and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, this study proposes a method to select a rheological framework and a constitutive model that couples thermo-oxidative aging effects in PE gas pipes. The model is developed within the widely recognized rheological framework and is grounded in continuum mechanics, continuum damage mechanics, and the aging behavior of polymer materials. This method and model are suitable for characterizing the mechanical dependency of PE pipes and demonstrate strong fitting performance. According to the calculation results, the goodness of fit of this constitutive model for the uniaxial tensile test results at the different aging times ranges from 0.982 to 0.999. The findings provide theoretical support for the simulation and service life prediction for PE pipelines.