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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Non-linear viscoelastic behavior of polymer melts interpreted by fractional viscoelastic model

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Very recently, researchers dealing with constitutive law pertinent viscoelastic materials put forward the successful idea to introduce viscoelastic laws embedded with fractional calculus, relating the stress function to a real order derivative of the strain function. The latter consideration leads to represent both, relaxation and creep functions, through a power law function. In literature there are many papers in which the best fitting of the peculiar viscoelastic functions using a fractional model is performed. However there are not present studies about best fitting of relaxation function and/or creep function of materials that exhibit a non-linear viscoelastic behavior, as polymer melts, using a fractional model. In this paper the authors propose an advanced model for capturing the non-linear trend of the shear viscosity of polymer melts as function of the shear rate. Results obtained with the fractional model are compared with those obtained using a classical model which involves classical Maxwell elements. The comparison between experimental data and the theoretical model shows a good agreement, emphasizing that fractional model is proper for studying viscoelasticity, even if the material exhibits a non-linear behavior.