Progressive Damage and Failure Analysis of Composite Laminate Structure

This paper presents the authors’ contribution to the international collaboration study, Composite Blind Analysis Challenge, organized by Five Eyes Science and Technology (FVEY S&T). The objective of this study is to predict the failure modes of fiber-reinforced laminated composites and their ultimate strengths using an engineering approach with affordable modeling effort and computational cost, then validate this approach through carefully designed composite panel tests and reliable material properties. A meso-scale damage modeling methodology was implemented with the commercial finite element (FE) software ABAQUS to conduct the analyses. To make the model practical and efficient, major damage modes, including interlaminar delamination and adhesive bond failure, are captured using the cohesive zone modeling (CZM) technique, and intralaminar failures are examined via continuum damage modeling using the LaRC05 failure criteria. The simulation results, including laminate displacement responses, failure modes, and failure load predictions for two loading cases (T-pull and Side-bend), are compared with the experimental test results to validate the effectiveness of the FE models. This effort aims to examine FE modeling methodologies and to put forward recommendations and lessons learned for damage modeling of composite laminate structures under various static loading conditions.