Cohesive element formulation for z-pin delamination bridging in fibre reinforced laminates

Abstract

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An energy-equivalent bridging map formulation for modelling delamination in through-thickness reinforced composite laminates

“…The z-pin is orthogonally inserted in a specific fibre bed -polymer matrix composite. Further details can be found in (26). The output of these measurements are the bridging tractions versus total displacements, which allow to calculate the apparent enhancement to the fracture toughness brought by the z-pin (green box in Figure 1).…”

“…Mohamed et al (26) proposed a multi-scale framework, combining a smeared bridging effect along the interface of cohesive elements with a semi-analytical constitutive bridging model from Allegri et al (15). The analytical model can estimate the exact bridging map for an individual z-pin in the form of a pair of three-dimensional (3D) surfaces, which relate traction and shear forces with opening and sliding displacements.…”

Fatigue life prediction of z-fibre pinned composite laminate under mode I loading

“…Due to the complexity of the z-pin bridging nature, numerical models have also been established as an alternative solution [10][11][12]. Those constitutive models have been implemented in the finite element (FE) analysis to simulate zpinned structures under static loading [6,[8][9][10][11][13][14][15]. Early approaches applied nonlinear spring elements on the delamination surfaces to model the bridging behaviour of z-pins [6,8,9,13].…”

Influence of Z-pin embedded length on the interlaminar traction response of multi-directional composite laminates

“…Modelling Z-pinned reinforcements in FRP composites have been the subject of numerous studies [6,8,9,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. In most cases, researchers have implemented a Z-pinned interface bridging law in a Finite Element (FE) framework to predict behaviour of standard fracture toughness test specimens [8,18,23] or structural T-joints [20,26].…”

“…In this model Z-pins are described as a Euler-Bernoulli beams undergoing small but finite rotations upon elastic deformation. New modifications to this model are proposed in this paper and fitted against the new data to generate a comprehensive traction response map, for a range of Z-pin embedded length, which can be implemented in a numerical FE framework [25].…”