Abstract
Out-of-plane wrinkling has a significant influence on the mechanical performance of composite laminates. Numerical simulations were conducted to investigate the progressive failure behavior of fiber-reinforced composite laminates with out-of-plane wrinkle defects subjected to axial compression. To describe the material degradation, a three-dimensional elastoplastic damage model with four damage modes (i.e., fiber tensile failure, matrix failure, fiber kinking/splitting, and delamination) was developed based on the LaRC05 criterion. To improve the computational efficiency in searching for the fracture angle in the matrix failure analysis, a high-efficiency and robust modified algorithm that combines the golden section search method with an inverse interpolation based on an existing study is proposed. The elastoplastic damage model was implemented in the finite-element code Abaqus using a user-defined material subroutine in Abaqus/Explicit. The model was applied to the progressive failure analysis of IM7/8552 composite laminates with out-of-plane wrinkles subjected to axial compressive loading. The numerical results showed that the compressive strength prediction obtained by the elastoplastic damage model is more accurate than that derived with an elastic damage model. The present model can describe the nonlinearity of the laminate during the damage evolution and determine the correct damage locations, which are in good agreement with experimental observations. Furthermore, it was discovered that the plasticity effects should not be neglected in laminates with low wrinkle levels.
Highlights
Fiber waviness is a type of manufacturing defect that occurs mostly during filament winding.Ply level out-of-plane waviness can result in severe degradation of mechanical properties, in particular, such as the compressive strength of composites
A similar study was conducted by Davidson and Waas [2], who found that for thick unidirectional carbon fiber polymer matrix composites, there exists a fiber misalignment angle at which the compressive strength is the global minimum
We extended the elastoplastic damage model described in [23] to a three-dimensional (3D) damage analysis and conducted a progressive failure simulation of composite laminates with out-of-plane wrinkle defects subjected to axial compression
Summary
Fiber waviness is a type of manufacturing defect that occurs mostly during filament winding. Hsiao and Daniel [1] conducted theoretical and experimental studies on unidirectional composites with out-of-plane wrinkles under compressive loading They discovered that the stiffness and strength of the laminates decreases significantly with increasing fiber waviness. Prabhakar and Waas [11,12,13], Sun et al [14], and Yuan et al [15] applied a micromechanics model to predict the compressive failure behavior of unidirectional fiber-reinforced laminated composites using plasticity to approximate the nonlinearity of matrices. We extended the elastoplastic damage model described in [23] to a three-dimensional (3D) damage analysis and conducted a progressive failure simulation of composite laminates with out-of-plane wrinkle defects subjected to axial compression. The contributions of this study are as follows: (1) We conducted a progressive failure analysis of multidirectional fiber-reinforced polymer laminates with embedded wrinkle defects based on an elastoplastic damage model.
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