A progressive damage model for carbon fiber-reinforced polymer laminates subjected to fastener pull-through failure

Abstract

Most studies on composite joints focus on in-plane bearing mode, while little attention to fastener pull-through failure mode from out-of-plane loads. This paper presents a 3D continuum damage mechanics (CDM) model to investigate and assess the mechanical behaviors of carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) laminates subjected to pull-through failure. The proposed model based on the use of intralaminar and interlaminar damage models is established and implemented by means of a user-defined subroutine VUMAT for Abaqus/Explicit. The novelty lies in the material model integrating the thresholds preset by the semianalytical approximation approach, which largely eliminates unnecessary fracture angle enumerations in Puck’s IFF theory, coupled with the simple parabolic interpolation search (SPIS) technique for optimal fracture angle search, considerably reducing the computational burden. Moreover, the numerical results compare well with experiments, effectively replicating the load–displacement response, damage modes, failure behaviors and damaged areas. This study provides an accurate and efficient computational methodology to analyze pull-through failures, enhancing the damage modeling and predictive capabilities for composite joints under out-of-plane loads.