Characterizing the creep of viscoelastic materials by fractal derivative models

In this paper, we make the first attempt to apply the fractal derivative to modeling viscoelastic behavior. The methodology of scaling transformation is utilized to obtain the creep modulus and relaxation compliance for the proposed fractal Maxwell and Kelvin models. Comparing with the fractional derivatives reported in the literature, the fractal derivative as a local operator has lower calculation costs and memory storage requirements. Moreover, numerical results show that the proposed fractal models require fewer parameters, have simpler mathematical expression and result in higher accuracy than the classical integer-order derivative models. Results further confirm that the proposed fractal models can characterize the creep behavior of viscoelastic materials.