Transverse Failure of Unidirectional Composites: Sensitivity to Interfacial Properties

Abstract

A computational framework is developed to model the transverse failure of fiber-reinforced polymer-matrix composites, with an emphasis on capturing fiber debonding with a cohesive failure model along the fiber/matrix interfaces. We introduce a nonlinear material sensitivity formulation to quantify how variations in the interfacial cohesive zone properties affect the transverse failure response. The analytic sensitivity formulation is implemented in an interface-enriched generalized finite element method (IGFEM) framework that allows for the simulation of transverse failure in a composite layer consisting of hundreds of closely packed fibers discretized with finite element meshes that do not need to conform to the composite microstructure.