[SY-J1] Multiscale Modeling of Fiber Reinforced Materials for Future Aerospace Structures
Invited
The current practice of designing composite aerospace structures relies on extensive testing, coupled to a bottom-up, pyramidal building block approach, to ensure structural integrity and damage tolerance. Reducing the number of tests can lead to a substantial decrease in total design cost of many vehicles. Cost reduction is enabled by developing high fidelity computational models which can provide valuable information regarding the performance of a structure up to and including failure. Composites, because of their heterogeneity, display a rich variety of damage (dissipation) and failure (two piece) mechanisms starting at the atomistic scale and progressing up in length scale. An acute understanding of the physics and mechanics of these mechanisms, at different scales, is essential in order to develop physically sound theories and attendant computational methids for predicting the structural performance of a composite structure. With a view towards addressing future, robotically manufactured polymer matrix composite structures for lightweight vehicle applications, this talk will address a multiscale computational modeling framework that the author has developed over the past deacde to model and predict the structural performance of polymer matrix composites. Nonlinear material response, including damage and failure, is incorporated in conjunction with geometric nonlinearity to predict damage evolution and failure that is observed in the laboratory for a variety of examples. Issues related to mesh objectivity will be addressed and the importance of this aspect in numerical predictions will be highlighted.