Multiscale modelling of thermoplastic woven fabric composites: From micromechanics to mesomechanics

Abstract

The mechanical properties of woven composites can be predicted by using a multiscale modelling approach. The starting point to its application is the microscale (the level of fibres, matrix and interfaces), that allows the computation of the homogenised behaviour of the yarn. The aim of this work was to predict the yarn-level behaviour of a thermoplastic-based woven composite in order to allow the formulation of a representative constitutive model that can be used to predict ply properties at the mesoscale. To accomplish this purpose, an insitu characterisation of the microconstituents was carried out. This served to generate inputs for three different representative volume element (RVE) models that allowed predicting the yarn longitudinal, transverse and shear responses. These mechanical characteristics allowed the determination of homogenised yarn constitutive behaviour which was found to be characterised by significant nonlinearity until failure, specially in transverse and shear directions.

Multi-scale analysis of the mechanical behaviour of a flax fibre reinforced composite under low-velocity impact

“…20 Much research was conducted to investigate the Low Velocity Impact behaviour for composite materials using the multiscale modelling method. [21][22][23][24][25][26][27] Experimental results have shown better energy absorption performance of plant fibre composite subjected to impact test. [28][29][30][31][32][33][34] Therefore, the numerical modelling approach was extended for biocomposite to study the LVI behaviour.…”

A review on micromechanical modelling of progressive failure in unidirectional fibre-reinforced composites

“…While in the longitudinal tension, the fibres are modelled as isotropic and linearelastic up to failure. In order to capture the stochastic failure of fibres under longitudinal tension, two strategies are usually used: synthetically insert the fracture planes perpendicular to the fibre direction using a cohesive surface with experimentally-obtained stochastic failure parameters [17], and assign the statistically analysed (i.e. Weibull distribution [18]) stochastic failure strength to fibres with a thermodynamically consistent isotropic damage model [19,20].…”

“…They also pointed out the importance of the shear strength of the interface in the determination of compressive strength and failure mode of composites under longitudinal compression. More recently, 3D high-fidelity RVE models were developed to investigate the effects of mechanical properties of constituents, friction between fibre and matrix, initial fibre waviness angle and misalignment and environmental conditions on the failure strength of CFRP composites in [17,21,44,59,94].…”

Dry Textile Forming Simulations: A Benchmarking Exercise

“…This modelling concept was further developed for capturing deformation of complex textile under compaction and during weaving processes, in which the fibre bundle was modelled by chain of 1D beam elements with shared nodes. Numerical models using this approach sit in between computational micromechanics and meso-mechanics (Múgica et al, 2019) and are referred to as micro-mesoscale modelling or multi-filament (MF) method in the rest of the text. The deformation of the mesoscale and MF models rely heavily on the contact algorithms that control the interactions between yarns (in mesoscale models) and bundles of fibre in yarns (in MF models).…”