Abstract
Initiation and propagation of cracks in composite materials can severely affect their global mechanical properties. Due to the lower strength of the interlaminar bonding compared to fibers and the matrix, delamination between plies is known to be one of the most common failure modes in these materials. It is therefore deemed necessary to gain more insight into this type of failure to guide the design of composite structures towards ensuring their robustness and reliability during service. In this work, delamination of interlaminar bonding in composite end-notched flexure (ENF) samples was modeled using a newly developed stochastic 3D extended finite element method (XFEM). The proposed numerical scheme, which also incorporates the cohesive zone model, was used to characterize the mode II delamination results obtained from ENF testing on polyphenylene sulfide (PPS)/glass unidirectional (UD) composites. The nonrepeatable material responses, often seen during fracture testing of UD composites, were well captured with the current numerical model, demonstrating its capacity to predict the stochastic fracture properties of composites under mode II loading conditions.
Highlights
Nowadays, fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites are widely used in various engineering applications, including aeronautical, marine, and automotive industries
A variety of numerical modeling techniques have been proposed in the past decades, and they can be categorized into mesh-free methods, such as smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) [15], element-free Galerkin method (EFGM) [16], and finite difference method (FDM) [17], and mesh-based methods, such as finite element method (FEM) [18] and boundary element method (BEM) [19]
Based on the XFEM modeling framework, we have previously developed a user-defined element in the finite element (FE) software Abaqus to simulate delamination in UD composites under mode I
Summary
Fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites are widely used in various engineering applications, including aeronautical, marine, and automotive industries. Numerical models of crack initiation and propagation during ENF testing of composites have been developed in the past (e.g., Harper and Hallett [6] and Fan et al [7]) to facilitate the design of composite structures prior to prototyping and testing stages These investigations do not typically account for the heterogeneous and stochastic properties of composites, which are commonly observed during material and product testing. Among recent stochastic modeling works in the field, Ashcroft et al [10] introduced microstructure randomness in the fracture properties of carbon fiber reinforced polymer composite materials for finite element simulation of double cantilever beam (DCB) tests using interface cohesive elements. Jumel [11] employed a finite difference numerical method to study crack initiation and propagation in DCB specimens with randomly fluctuating interface properties along the crack path The effect of this variability at the microscopic level on the parameters measured at the macroscopic level was investigated. The numerical results were compared with a set of tests performed on polyphenylene sulfide (PPS)/glass UD composites
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
