A proposal for similitude in characterizing fatigue delamination behavior with fibre bridging of carbon-fibre reinforced polymer composites

Methods based on fracture mechanics have been widely used in fatigue delamination growth (FDG) characterization of composite laminates. These methods are based on the similitude hypothesis. It is therefore important to have appropriate parameters to well represent the similitude, which is useful for fatigue delamination test standard...

Hygrothermal effects on fatigue delamination behavior in composite laminates

Fatigue delamination growth (FDG) is an important failure in composite structures during their long-term operations. Hygrothermal aging can have significant effects on interlaminar resistance. It is therefore really necessary to explore FDG behavior in composite laminates with hygrothermal aging. Dynamic mechanical thermal analysis (DMTA),...

Fatigue delamination behavior in composite laminates at different stress ratios and temperatures

This study provides an investigation on mode I fatigue delamination growth (FDG) with fibre bridging at different R-ratios and temperatures in carbon-fibre reinforced polymer composites. FDG experiments were first conducted at different temperatures of R-ratios 0.1 and 0.5 via unidirectional double cantilever beam (DCB) specimens. A fatigue...

An adaptive floating node based formulation for the analysis of multiple delaminations under quasi-static loading

A novel and efficient numerical formulation for the modelling of multiple delaminations growth in laminated composite materials subjected to quasi-static loading is presented. The proposed formulation alleviates the high computational cost associated with models featuring cohesive elements by using a novel Adaptive Refinement Scheme and an...

A 3D separable cohesive element for modelling the coupled failure in laminated composite materials

The interaction between matrix cracks and interface delamination is a major failure mechanism in composite laminates and has been a subject of active research in recent years. Although coupled failure behaviour of composite laminates between matrix cracks and delamination has been observed in experiments, accurate modelling of this phenomenon...

On cohesive element parameters and delamination modelling

The cohesive element (CE) has been widely used to model delamination in laminated composites. The penalty stiffness, interfacial strength and fracture toughness are three CE parameters that often determine the accuracy of the numerical analysis by finite elements (FEs). The fracture toughness may be experimentally determined through standard...

A separable cohesive element for modelling coupled failure in laminated composite materials

A three-dimensional separable cohesive element (SCE) is proposed to enable the modelling of interaction between matrix cracking and interfacial delamination in laminated fibre-reinforced composite materials. It is demonstrated that traditional cohesive elements are incapable of modelling the coupled failure mechanisms accurately if...