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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 88
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NINTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTATIONAL STRUCTURES TECHNOLOGY
Edited by: B.H.V. Topping and M. Papadrakakis
Paper 305

A Three-Dimensional Damage Model for Composites with Non-linear Shear Behaviour

C.T. McCarthy and R. O'Higgins

Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, Materials and Surface Science Institute, University of Limerick, Ireland

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
C.T. McCarthy, R. O'Higgins, "A Three-Dimensional Damage Model for Composites with Non-linear Shear Behaviour", in B.H.V. Topping, M. Papadrakakis, (Editors), "Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computational Structures Technology", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 305, 2008. doi:10.4203/ccp.88.305
Keywords: constitutive modelling, non-linear shear, composites, finite element analysis, material damage.

Summary
It is well know that continuous fibre reinforced composite laminates display significant non-linear stress-strain behaviour when loaded in shear. To date, the Hahn-Tsai [1] non-linear shear model has been used extensively to capture this behaviour when modelling composite materials and structures [2,3]. However, a major draw-back with this model is that it is very difficult, if indeed possible at all, to fit it to laminates that display non-linear shear behaviour up to and beyond 5% shear strain.

In this paper an experimental study is carried out to examine unidirectional carbon fibre reinforced epoxy laminates loaded in shear. It is shown that this material displays significant non-linear shear stress-strain behaviour to rupture and that it is not possible to model this with the Hahn-Tsai model. A novel damage model is derived from first principles and the non-linear shear behaviour is captured exactly using a cubic spline interpolation method. Hashin's [4] failure criteria are used to predict damage in the laminates and this is incorporated within the framework of the material model. The model is fully three-dimensional and is implemented into the ABAQUS finite element code using the UMAT user defined material subroutine. It is shown that the model accurately predicts the response of the laminates under longitudinal, transverse and shear loadings. The paper presents both the experimental and numerical findings.

References
1
H.T. Hahn, S.W. Tsai, "Non-linear Elastic Behaviour of Unidirectional Composite Laminate", Journal of Composite Materials, 7, 102-118, 1973. doi:10.1177/002199837300700108
2
S.J. Kim, J.S. Hwang, J.H. Kim, "Progressive Failure analysis of Pin-Loaded Laminated Composites using Penalty Finite Element Method", AIAA, 36(1), 75-80, 1998. doi:10.2514/2.354
3
L.B. Lessard, M.M. Shokrieh, "Two-Dimensional Modelling of Composite Pinned-Joint Failure", Journal of Composite Materials, 29(5), 671-697, 1995.
4
Z. Hashin, "Failure Criteria for Unidirectional Fiber Composites", Journal of Applied Mechanics, 47, 329-334, 1980.

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