Crystal Plasticity Based Modelling of Shear Response of Carbon Fibre Reinforced Composites

Abstract

Due to their superior strength-to-weight performance, there is an increasing tendency to use carbon fibre reinforced composites (CFRP) in different engineering applications. Under transverse loading, the resulting stress-strain curve has a nonlinear character with significant hardening. As far as modelling of CFRP is concerned, the hardening behaviour is typically described by fitting curves to experimental data. Obviously, this route does not take deformation mechanisms at constituent level e.g. fibre rotation and matrix yielding, into account and leads to descriptive models rather than predictive ones. Such models yield poor predictions particularly for CFRP's with 3D microstructural architectures, which have achieved much higher ductility level and texture evolution as compared to conventional 2D architectures. In recent studies Meza et al. (2019), Tan and Liu (2020), motivated by the similarity between the shearing along slip planes and the plastic deformation of a tow, crystal plasticity is exploited to capture the evolution of the composite microstructure. This contribution focuses on the crystal plasticity inspired model of CFRP and its implementation within the commercial finite element software Abaqus through UEL subroutine. The predictions of the model are assessed by means of two example problems including combined loading scenarios. © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of IWPDF 2021 Chair, Tuncay Yalçinkaya