Cracks in a material
A team led by Zhao Chang Fang from Nanjing University of Science and Technology has developed a practical way for studying the intralaminar crack propagation of unidirectional fiber reinforced polymer composite (GFRP) laminate. The novel approach was implemented by finite element analysis (FEA), and validated by tensile/compression experiment. The novel approach using FEA was conducted using a progressive damage model (PDM) -which was executed by using the implicit user material (UMAT), explicit user material (VUMAT), the extended finite element method (XFEM) subroutines completed by a microscale model of crack propagation that was implemented using a representative volume element (RVE) algorithm. The results from the predictions agreed very well with experimental results from mechanical testing and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). In conclusion, using a blended approach for FEA simulation, namely by combining the the PDM and RVE with XFEM subroutines, could be a step forward to simulating the intralaminar crack propagation phenomenon in order to gain deeper insights into the micro–macro failure mechanism.
The members of his team of international researchers are hailed from Nanjing University of Science and Technology (comprising Jianlin Zhong, Rui Ren, Kebin Zhang, Zhendong Zhang, Guigao Le), and Newcastle University (Kheng Lim Goh).
The work has been published in Structures (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.istruc.2022.05.064). For further details and enquiry on potential collaboration, please contact Changfang Zhao at [email protected], Jianlin Zhong at [email protected] or Kheng Lim Goh at [email protected].
