Damage characterization of composites to support an orthotropic plasticity material model

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the development of test procedures to characterize the damage-related behavior of a unidirectional composite at room temperature and quasi-static loading conditions and use the resulting data in the damage sub-model of a newly developed material model for orthotropic composites. This material model has three distinct sub-models to handle elastic and inelastic deformations, damage, and failure. A unidirectional composite—T800/F3900 that was the focus of our previous work, is used to illustrate how the deformation and damage-related experimental procedures are developed and used. The implementation of the damage sub-model into LS-DYNA is verified using single-element tests and validated using impact tests. Results show that the implementation yields reasonably accurate predictions of impact behavior involving deformation and damage in structural composites.