Construction and experimental verification of a hyperelastic constitutive model for a quartz fiber/silicone rubber flexible composite material

Flexible textile composite materials have received increasing attention in the application of variable configuration aircraft due to their flexibility， and foldable and unfoldable properties. However， there are still great uncertainties about their mechanical properties. Uniaxial tensile experiments with five off-axial angles were conducted to study the uniaxial tensile mechanical behaviors of a quartz fiber/silicone rubber flexible textile composite material. A hyperelastic constitutive model was established based on the characteristics of the brittleness of quartz fiber and the toughness of silicone rubber， and the strain energy density function was decoupled into the strain energy density functions from fiber elongations along the warp and weft yarns direction， and the strain energy density function coupling silicone rubber elongation and fiber shear. The model parameters were determined based on the uniaxial tensile test data. Comparison with the results of off-axis tensile test shows that the prediction error of the hyperelastic constitutive model for the in-plane tensile behavior is less than 3.88%. According to the flexible and deformable characteristics of the quartz fiber/silicone rubber flexible textile composite material， a circular membrane pneumatic loading test verification method is adopted， which can uniformly apply load to the membrane surface. The proposed hyperelastic constitutive model is realized by the user subroutine UANISOHYPER_INV of the finite element software Abaqus， and the error between simulation data and experimental data is less than 2.9%， indicating that the established hyperelastic constitutive model has good applicability for mechanical characterization of the quartz fiber/silicone rubber flexible textile composite material.