Numerical treatment of fiber reinforced plastic crushing mechanism in virtual performance solution: Possibilities and limitations

Abstract

This paper describes both experimental and numerical investigations on the crushing behavior of fiber-reinforced plastic composites (triaxial-braid) for almost rectangular crush specimens. Fiber-reinforced plastic in general is an enormously versatile material group which allows engineers to adapt it to varying tasks, but causes large challenges regarding a trustable numerical forecast in structural simulations. The virtual performance solution (Virtual PAM-CRASH) solver can manage the crushing behavior of fiber-reinforced plastic by a phenomenological implementation, the innovation PLY100. It's possibilities as well as limitations are described briefly in the present paper. These limitations are the incentive for a new approach based on shell elements, which are arranged in a stacked shell order. The delamination process is modelled by using cohesive interface contacts. General ply cards, which are derived from standard material characterization tests, are improved via the inverse method, called MCMC method with an integrated Metropolis algorithm. Besides the numerical simulations, a large experimental drop-weight-tower study was conducted, of which a small extract is presented here. In conclusion, the new numerical approach is able to predict the crushing mechanism and also the mechanical properties during crushing accurately. Small deviations between numerical and experimental results are presented and will be addressed in a future publication.