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Cohesive Parameters

The document discusses constitutive equations for modeling delamination and damage in composite materials. It describes: 1) A bi-linear softening constitutive model used to represent the behavior of decohesion elements under pure Mode I, II, or III loading. 2) A double cantilever beam test on a carbon fiber epoxy composite used to determine the interlaminar fracture toughness. 3) Methods for determining the penalty parameter and strengths used to define the constitutive equations, including using a penalty of 106 N/mm based on previous studies.

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42 views7 pages

Cohesive Parameters

The document discusses constitutive equations for modeling delamination and damage in composite materials. It describes: 1) A bi-linear softening constitutive model used to represent the behavior of decohesion elements under pure Mode I, II, or III loading. 2) A double cantilever beam test on a carbon fiber epoxy composite used to determine the interlaminar fracture toughness. 3) Methods for determining the penalty parameter and strengths used to define the constitutive equations, including using a penalty of 106 N/mm based on previous studies.

Uploaded by

hua2001
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Pure mode constitutive equations

For pure Mode I and pure Mode II or Mode III loading the bi-linear softening constitutive behavior
represented in Figure 2 is used. A high initial stiffness (penalty stiffness, K) is used to hold the top and
bottom faces of the decohesion element together in the linear elastic range (point 1 in figure 2). For
pure Mode I, II or III loading, after the interfacial normal or shear tractions attain their respective
interlaminar tensile or shear strengths (point 2 in Figure 2), the stiffnesses are gradually reduced to zero.
The onset displacements are obtained as: , , where N is the
interlaminar tensile strength, and S and T are the interlaminar shear strengths.

The irresversible, bi-linear, softening constitutive behavior shownin Figure 2 have been developed in
previous work, and can be defined as
Mode I delamination growth for an epoxy composite

The ASTM standard specimen used to determine the interlaminar fracture toughness in Mode I (G IC) is
the double cantilever beam (DCB) specimen.

A DCB test specimen of a (0), T300/977-2 carbon fiber reinforced epoxy laminate, containing a thin
insert at the mid-plane near the loaded end, is simulated. This specimen is 150 mm long, 20 mm wide,
with two 1.98 mm thick plies, and with an initial crack length of 55 mm. The DCB tests on this specimen
were performed by Morais et al. The material properties are shown in Table 1.

In order to define the element constitutive equation, the penalty parameter and the interlaminar tensile
and shear strengths must be determined. The choice of the penalty parameter can have an effect on the
solution. Too low of a value leads to an inaccurate representation of the mechanical behavior of the
interface, whereas high values can promote numerical errors related to computer precision. The
optimum value for the penalty parameter is the largest value that does not lead to numerical problems.
Some methodoloes have ben proposed to define the most adequate value for penalty parmaeters[47].
Based on previous investigations[36], a penalty K=10 6 N/mm is used here.

Damage initiation criterion

The initial response of the cohesive elements at each damage model is based on linear elastic fracture
mechanics (LEFM) and is assumed to be linear until a crack initiation criterion is satisfied. The penalty
stiffness, Ki, of each traction-separation response law that relates traction to the separation of cohesive
elements before crack initiation is defined as below:

Where I =I II, and III is fracture modes, are the cohesive strength and critical separation of
pure modes of fracture, respectively. In the present work, the penalty stiffness for all modes of fracture
are considered to be the same, i.e. KI = KII = KIII =K. Several methodologies have been proposed to
determine the penalty stiffness must be high enough to avoid interpenetration of the crack surfaces and
to avoid interpenetration of the crack surfaces and to avoid artificial compliance from being defined into
the model by the cohesive elements. However, amore than enough value can lead to numerical
problems. Turon, et al assumed that whenever the though-the-thickness Young’s modulus of the
adjacent sub-laminate, E3, is small enough compared to Kxt, the effective elastic properties of the
material will not be affected by the cohesive face. Where t is the thickness of adjacent sub-laminate of
composite specimen. Therefore, an equation to calculate the interface stiffness for Mode I is suggested,
as mentioned below:

Where α is a parameter larger than 1. Turon et al. recommended considering α =50. This value is used
for derivation of the penalty stiffness in the analysis presented in this work.
The RVE is composed of three regions: the PP matrix, the reinforcing glass fibers, and the interfaces
between fibers and matrix. The fibers are modeled as an isotropic linear elastic material with properties
shown in Table 2 in Appendix, while the PP matrix is modeled as an isotropic linear elastic with
pressuredependent plasticity coupled with a ductile damage model with properties shown in Table 3. In
the following subsections, the constitutive models for the matrix and for the fiber-matrix interface are
discussed in detail.

It is widely known that when damage starts, the conventional continuum damage mechanics framework
suffers from localization problem. This means the energy required to make additional damage is proportional
to the size of the element and as the size approaches zero, the dissipated energy due to damage approaches
zero. However, these phenomena are unphysical and must be avoided. To overcome spurious mesh dependency and
ensure objective simulations, the characteristic length of the element L was introduced to the
fracture energy expression:

For this, instead of working with the stress-strain relationship, the stress-displacement concept is used.
Therefore, the evolution of the damage variable D as a function of effective plastic displacement was used for
simulation input. Since the experimental data [21] of PP shows an abrupt drop of the
stress-strain curve after the peak stress (brittle damage/fracture), a value of effective plastic displacement
at failure, (i.e. 0.1315 µm), was arbitrarily selected to be small enough to represent the brittle behavior, yet
large enough to prevent the convergence problem.
While we set the interface properties to tmax = 20 MPa and Gc = 3.7 J/m2

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