Simulation of interfacial debonding in hollow particle reinforced composites with VCFEM

Abstract

The addition of hollow glass microsphere into composites is a method to improve mechanical properties. However, the interfacial debonding of hollow microsphere inevitably causes a decrease in the mechanical properties of the material, which ultimately leads to the failure of the composites. In the numerical simulation of such hollow particle-reinforced composites, the ordinary displacement finite element requires a large number of meshes, which undoubtedly greatly increases the computational cost. In this paper, a new VCFEM is proposed to solve this problem by establishing a two-dimensional Voronoi cell finite element model, deriving the residual energy generalized function of hollow particle-reinforced composites, and calculating the interface debonding. The simulation results are compared with the commercial software MARC, ABAQUS to verify the effectiveness of this VCFEM. The results show that this VCFEM greatly improves the computational efficiency while ensuring the accuracy. Based on this model, this paper also investigates the effect of the generation of interfacial debonding on the overall structure and the effect of different wall thickness of hollow particles on the damage of element debonding.