Abstract
The self-heating effect, occurred in the viscoelastic media due to the mechanical energy dissipation during cyclic loading of a structure and its transformation into heat, is one of crucial problems of operation of elements made of polymeric composites. In some special cases of loading parameters the self-heating effect could dominate fatigue process, which results in intensification of structural degradation. The paper deals with finite element formulation of the selfheating effect and thermal fatigue of polymer composites. The definition of material properties was based on experimentally determined dynamic moduli of the material, which were converted to Prony series for implementation in the computational algorithm realized in commercial finite element software. Implementation procedure of the numerical simulation and exemplary results were presented. Obtained numerical results were compared with experimental results and reveal good convergence.