Session: 03-03-01: Damage, Fatigue, and Fracture I

Paper Number: 107460

107460 - Effects of Manufacturing Processes on Composite Progressive Damage Responses 

The manufacturing of light weight composite materials inevitably induces defects in the constituent materials due to the curing process and mismatch of fiber and matrix properties and other uncertainties at the microstructural level. A significant difference between the neat resin matrix properties and the in-situ matrix properties has been observed due to this, and these manufacturing-induced effects have been investigated in the literature.

However, there was no quantitative relationship developed to determine how these manufacturing effects are influencing the deviation of the in-situ matrix properties from that of the neat resin properties.

The present work aims to address this issue by incorporating the manufacturing induced effects to predict the composite laminate non-linear behavior.

This is done by smearing the effects of the fiber distribution and accounting for the variability in the material properties (strength) by carefully choosing a probability distribution to assign strength properties to thin strips of lamina in which matrix splitting failure is active.

This partitioning of lamina into a bunch of thin strips and bulk region is done along the direction of the fiber orientation. This semi-discrete finite element model enhances the discreteness greatly, while the model remains efficient and simple using solely continuum elements. The dominant mode of failure being the matrix failure, the cohesive modeling between plies also has to be accounted for, apart from modeling each ply individually. The results obtained are validated against the experimental data obtained for a [+45/−45]_s specimen under tensile loading.

Presenting Author: Sai Krishna Meka Purdue University

Presenting Author Biography: I am a graduate student from Aerospace engineering working under the guidance of Dr. Dianyun Zhang at Purdue University. My area of research is progressive damage of composite materials. My work mainly focusses on being able to bridge the gap between the composite material strength properties obtained from experiments and properties derived from simulations.

Authors:

Sai Krishna Meka Purdue University
Ryan Scott Enos Purdue University
Dianyun Zhang Purdue University