FINITE ELEMENT SIMULATION ON TENSILE CREEP BEHAVIOUR OF UNDERGROUND SUPPORT LINER

Polymer-based products are widely used as load-carrying components in different structural applications due to the ease of manufacture, installation, and long lifetime properties. In mining and tunnelling industry, fast-setting, thin polymer-based products are in demand as an underground support liner. Researchers have agreed that the time-dependent material properties of underground support liners have significance for short to long term applications. Although some creep tests were performed in literature, there is no available study on the numerical analysis/simulation of the creep behaviour of underground support liners. In this study, viscoelastic mathematical models developed for two different underground support liners were analyzed in ABAQUS finite element numerical modelling software with a developed subroutine. After the implementation, tensile creep test specimens were modelled to verify the new subroutine. There are two main purposes of the simulation of experiments; Firstly, to verify that the subroutine works in accordance with the actual behaviour of the material, secondly, to obtain realistic creep behaviour results for cases where experiments were not performed. As a result, a good agreement was obtained between the mathematical model predictions and numerical results for different stress levels. The proposed subroutines may create a basement for future numerical studies