MODELLING PROGRESSIVE FAILURE OF LAMINATED COMPOSITE STRUCTURES

Abstract

Computational modelling of progressive failure of composite materials has been a topic of much research in recent years. In this thesis, a 3-dimensional separable cohesive element (SCE) has been developed for modelling the coupled failure of composite laminates. Furthermore, a comprehensive study on the selection of critical cohesive element parameters and their effects on modelling accuracy and efficiency has been performed. The issue of high computational expense for failure simulation of composite structures is a constant challenge. Two adaptive computational ideas to seed degrees of freedom only where necessary have been proposed and developed in this thesis, namely the adaptive floating node method (A-FNM) and adaptive discrete-smeared crack (A-DiSC) method. The former introduces an adaptive refinement and coarsening scheme to simplify the modelling procedure and reduces computational cost. In the A-DiSC model, an adaptive integrated discrete/smeared formulation is developed and demonstrated for progressive damage.