Controversies in some of the commonly used damage models incorporated in commercial FE codes

Sitnikova, Elena, Yu, Tianhong and Li, Shuguang (2016) Controversies in some of the commonly used damage models incorporated in commercial FE codes. In ECCM 2016 - Proceeding of the 17th European Conference on Composite Materials. European Conference on Composite Materials, ECCM..

Abstract

In composite materials, once damage initiates, material stiffness gradually reduces due to the evolution in damage. In particular, if damage is induced in a unidirectional composite by the load applied in the transverse direction, this would result in the degradation of the transverse elastic modulus as well as the associated shear moduli. The extents of the moduli degradation are usually neither independent nor identical. However, this is being ignored in many of the composite damage models available nowadays, even in those implemented as "built-in" material models in the finite element (FE) software packages that are commercially available nowadays and are widely used in industry. Examples of erroneous damage predictions as obtained from some of the commonly used FE packages are presented in this paper. The level of inconsistency is alarming, in particular, if these models and associated codes are supposed to facilitate practical designs of engineering artefacts. The objective of this paper is to bring to the attention of practitioners that some basic self-regulatory measures, the very least, those of a nature of common sense, are required in this respect of theoretical development before engineering exploitations.

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Contributors

Author: Elena Sitnikova

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