An adaptive shell element for explicit dynamic analysis of failure in laminated composites Part 2: Progressive failure and model validation
Journal article, 2021

To enable modelling of the progressive failure of large, laminated composite components under crash or impact loading, it is key to have a numerical methodology that is both efficient and numerically robust. A potential way is to adopt an adaptive method where the structure is initially represented by an equivalent single-layer shell model, which during the analysis is adaptively transformed to a high-resolution layer-wise model in areas where higher accuracy is required. Such a method was recently developed and implemented in the commercial finite element solver LS-DYNA, aiming at explicit crash analysis (Främby, Fagerström and Karlsson: An adaptive shell element for explicit dynamic analysis of failure in laminated composites - Part 1: Adaptive kinematics and numerical implementation, 2020). In the current work, the method is extended to the case of interacting inter- and intralaminar damage evolution. As a key part, we demonstrate the importance of properly regularising the intralaminar failure described by a smeared-crack model, and show that neglecting to account for the crack-versus-mesh orientation may lead to significant errors in the predicted energy dissipation. We also validate the adaptive approach against a four-point beam bending test with matrix-induced delamination growth, and simultaneously show the capability of the proposed method to – at lower computational expense – replicate the results from a refined, non-adaptive model.

Crash simulations

LS-DYNA

Regularisation

Composites

Adaptivity

Author

Johannes Främby

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Material and Computational Mechanics

Martin Fagerström

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Material and Computational Mechanics

Engineering Fracture Mechanics

0013-7944 (ISSN)

Vol. 244 107364

Subject Categories

Aerospace Engineering

Applied Mechanics

Computational Mathematics

DOI

10.1016/j.engfracmech.2020.107364

More information

Latest update

2/25/2021