Delamination analysis of composites by new orthotropic bimaterial extended finite element method

Abstract

SUMMARYThe extended finite element method (XFEM) is further improved for fracture analysis of composite laminates containing interlaminar delaminations. New set of bimaterial orthotropic enrichment functions are developed and utilized in XFEM analysis of linear-elastic fracture mechanics of layered composites. Interlaminar crack-tip enrichment functions are derived from analytical asymptotic displacement fields around a traction-free interfacial crack. Also, heaviside and weak discontinuity enrichment functions are utilized in modeling discontinuous fields across interface cracks and bimaterial weak discontinuities, respectively. In this procedure, elements containing a crack-tip or strong/weak discontinuities are not required to conform to those geometries. In addition, the same mesh can be used to analyze different interlaminar cracks or delamination propagation. The domain interaction integral approach is also adopted in order to numerically evaluate the mixed-mode stress intensity factors. A number of benchmark tests are simulated to assess the performance of the proposed approach and the results are compared with available reference results.

An experimental/numerical investigation into the main driving force for crack propagation in uni-directional fibre-reinforced composite laminae

“…Further developments in dynamics allowed the study of propagation in orthotropic materials using XFEM [22]. Other topical work has focussed on interlaminar delamination [23] and cracks in functionally graded composites [24], [25]. In this paper, a new tool based on the extended finite element method (XFEM) which allows to simulate the growth of arbitrary cracks in orthotropic materials is devised, analysed and validated experimentally.…”

XFEM buckling analysis of cracked composite plates

“…(30) and (31). Among several methods for numerical evaluation of these integrals [16,[46][47][48][49][50], the sub-triangulation technique along with the Gauss quadrature rule is adopted in this study [43].…”

“…This method has successfully been extended to several static and dynamic isotropic and orthotropic problems, as well as modeling inter laminar cracks in bi-materials [22,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. Recently, Nguyen-Thanh et al [39] developed an extended isogeometric shell formulation based on the Kirchhoff-Love theory.…”

T-spline based XIGA for fracture analysis of orthotropic media

“…The general form of orthotropic enrichment functions [37] have also been adopted in the enriched element free Galerkin (EFG) method [38]. Further developments have been reported for dynamics and moving cracks in orthotropic media [39,40] and delamination analysis of composites [41].…”