Development of a Model of Synergistic Effects Between Deterioration Mechanisms and Damage in Woven Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymeric Composite Structure

Abstract

Abstract The adoption of fossil-based hydrocarbon polymer composites has been successful in both the automotive and aircraft industries, and is rapidly expanding into buildings and civil infrastructure. One challenge to broader adoption of polymer composites in buildings and civil infrastructure is a limited ability to model the synergistic effects of the combined physical/chemical processes of environmental exposure and mechanical loading. Unlike other building materials, long-term experience and field performance data of polymer composites in buildings and civil infrastructure applications does not exist. The first and largest composite building system used in a high-rise exterior in the US is the facade of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) completed in 2015. Since historical, experience-based service life models for composite building applications are not available, it is crucial to build multiphysical-based models in order to predict composite service life performance on a semi-centennial or centennial time scale. This paper uses a parametrically homogenized deterioration model to hierarchical model the thermo-chemical-mechanical degradation at the structural length scale and proposes this computational model as a component to complete a new multi-physics-based service life prediction framework. This effort consists of three steps: (i) use the theory of synergistic effects between ultraviolet exposure and moisture exposure degradation processes developed by the authors to generate a residual, deterioration-induced damage variable field, (ii) implement the residual damage field as the initiation of a continuum damage model (CDM) at structure length scale, and (iii) recreate one 3D façade plate of the SFMOMA and perform parametric damage analysis.