Elasto-plasticity of paper

We develop a constitutive model of paper's in-plane biaxial tensile response accounting for the elastic-plastic hardening behavior, and its orthotropic character. The latter aspect is motivated by machine-made papers, which, in contrast to isotropic laboratory handsheets, are strongly oriented. We focus on modeling paper's response under monotonic loading, this restriction allowing us to treat the elastic-plastic response as a physically nonlinear elastic one. A strain energy function of a hyperbolic tangent form is developed so as to fit the entire range of biaxial and uniaxial experiments on a commercial grade paper. This function may then be introduced as the free energy function into a model based on thermomechanics with internal variables. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd.