Woven thermoplastic composite forming simulation with solid-shell element method

Abstract

-Textile composites become more and more popular in aeronautic industries, due to their high performances. In this work, based on the model shown in the paper [9], a solid-shell element is used to simulate the woven composite forming. Comparing with other shell elements, a distinctive advantage of solid-shell elements is that the complication on handing finite rotations does not exist. Accounting the specific mechanical behaviors of woven composite material, the tensile, in-plane shear, bending and compressive energies are taken into account depending on the fiber direction, and then the total strain energy is computed to be the sum of those energies. The necessary material data for the simulation come from standard tensile, compressive and bias test experiments. Some forming simulations are performed with this method, and we can observe the wrinkles that exhibit the influence of bending stiffness. The results show the efficiency of the approach.