Fractional Calculus Approach to Reproduce Material Viscoelastic Behavior, including the Time–Temperature Superposition Phenomenon

The design of modern products and processes cannot prescind from the usage of viscoelastic materials that provide extreme design freedoms at relatively low cost. Correct and reliable modeling of these materials allows effective use that involves the design, maintenance, and monitoring phase and the possibility of reuse and recycling. Fractional models are becoming more and more popular in the reproduction of viscoelastic phenomena because of their capability to describe the behavior of such materials using a limited number of parameters with an acceptable accuracy over a vast range of excitation frequencies. A particularly reliable model parametrization procedure, using the poles–zeros formulation, allows researchers to considerably reduce the computational cost of the calibration process and avoid convergence issues typically occurring for rheological models. The aim of the presented work is to demonstrate that the poles–zeros identification methodology can be employed not only to identify the viscoelastic master curves but also the material parameters characterizing the time–temperature superposition phenomenon. The proposed technique, starting from the data concerning the isothermal experimental curves, makes use of the fractional derivative generalized model to reconstruct the master curves in the frequency domain and correctly identify the coefficients of the WLF function. To validate the methodology, three different viscoelastic materials have been employed, highlighting the potential of the material parameters’ global identification. Furthermore, the paper points out a further possibility to employ only a limited number of the experimental curves to feed the identification methodology and predict the complete viscoelastic material behavior.