Weibull distribution application on temperature dependence of polyurethane storage modulus

Abstract

In this paper, a stiffness–temperature model based on Wei- bull statistics was applied to quantitatively describe changes in the storage modulus of thermoplastic polyur- ethane over a wide range of temperature. The variation of the storage modulus with temperature was obtained from dynamic mechanical analysis tests across transition tem- peratures. Both the physical and statistical parameters of the applied model were estimated in the process of para- metric fitting of the model to the storage modulus versus a temperature curve by using a trust region algorithm for a robust nonlinear least squares method. Good agreement be- tween the modeled and experimental data has been found over the entire investigated temperature range, including all observed relaxation transitions.