Progressive damage analysis and experiments of open-hole composite laminates subjected to compression loads

Abstract

Due to the stress concentration caused by the hole, failure of composite structures is prone to start in the vicinity of the hole edge. Thereby, it is very necessary to investigate the failure of open-hole composite laminates. In the present work, a user subroutine element in the commercial software ABAQUS is proposed for the progressive damage analysis of open-hole composite laminates subjected to compression loads. The proposed element is constructed by making use of the third-order shear deformation theory in conjunction with a two-dimensional progressive damage model. The fiber kink model and Puck criterion are introduced for failure analysis of fiber and matrix, respectively. The element weakening method is also utilized to predict the damage evolution of open-hole composite laminates subjected to compression loads. To verify the reliability of the proposed model, the compression tests of open-hole composite laminates have been carried out. The percentage error of failure load predicted by the proposed element relative to the experimental result is 6.1%. Furthermore, the proposed element presents the damage evolution of fiber and matrix for the lamina with different stacking angles. It is observed that the fiber and matrix damage occurs firstly at the hole edge for the 45 and 0 degree plies, and the damage propagates along the 45 degree direction. This method can contribute to exploring the failure mechanism of open-hole composite laminates, which can also serve as a reference for the design of composite structures.