Schematic diagram of Burgers material

A Burgers material is a viscoelastic material which consists of a Maxwell material and a Kelvin material in series. It is named after the Dutch physicist Johannes Martinus Burgers.

Given that the Kelvin material has an elasticity and viscosity , and the Maxwell material has an elasticity and viscosity , the Burgers model has the constitutive equation

where is the stress and is the strain.

Model characteristics

Comparison of creep and stress relaxation for three and four element models

This model incorporates viscous flow into the standard linear solid model, giving a linearly increasing asymptote for strain under fixed loading conditions.


This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Burgers material, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.