Numerical and experimental forming analysis of woven composites with double dome benchmark

Abstract

Numerical analysis of the forming processes for composite materials has already an acknowledged worth and thus urge to explore even more flexible techniques. The current research is intended to analyse the woven fabric composites using benchmark geometry of double dome for forming. The study has been carried out both experimentally and numerically. The latter has been accomplished by means of a continuous approach; used to analyse numerically the fibrous media exploiting a commercial finite element code i. e. ABAQUS/Explicit. The use of hypoelastic law with an objective derivative based on the fibre rotation tensor makes it possible to track the re-orientation of fibres after deformation. The user material subroutine VUMAT has been developed to incorporate the algorithm and the formulations adopted for fibrous media analysis. The tests have been executed by selecting two different orientations of fabric with respect to the edges of the die or punch. The experimental tests have been duly performed with a local development of forming tools. The digital image correlation (DIC) has also been exploited treating only the final form of the woven reinforcements to measure the shear angles. The numerical results corroborate very well with the experimental output in terms of a number of parameters selected for comparison.