This paper describes the development of a numerical model of (0°/90°) CFRP plates subjected to low velocity crushing, based on physical observations. The developed model is represented at the meso-scale and is based on five main ideas: 1 -meshing of each ply of the laminate; 2 -use of cohesive elements to represent delamination and plies splaying; 3 -simulation of macro-scale fragments; 4 -representation of the localized crushing of plies at their extremities with the introduction of a free-face-crushing concept; 5 -representation of contacts between plies, plies and impacted base, plies and debris. The results of the Abaqus/Explicit simulations show a good agreement with the experimental results, which demonstrates that the proposed methodology is able to predict the force, the main failure mechanisms and the phenomenology observed during experiments. Furthermore, an analysis of the repartition of absorbed energies is done, which shows that the most efficient mechanism is the localized crushing in the 0°plies.
a b s t r a c tA challenge in numerical simulation of crashworthiness study is to be able to predict the crush damage modes, their evolution during crushing and the energy absorption in any composite structure from elementary material characterisation data. Therefore, it is important to know the behavior of one ply subjected to crushing load, and especially to determine the mean crushing stress that could be used for simulation. For that purpose, quasi-static crushing tests are performed for different configurations of two CFRP materials, UD and fabrics to determine the mean crushing stress of plies alone and inside a laminate. This study shows there is a linear relationship between crushing load and the contact surface of the plies being crushed on a metallic base which enables actually to define a mean crushing stress for a ply. The method to calculate this value is presented in this paper, based on image analysis of specific crushing tests. Experimental results show that for the UD material, the mean crushing stresses in 0°and 90°plies are very close. The value for a balanced fabric is also similar, approximately 270 MPa.⇑ Corresponding author. Address: ISAE/DMSM,
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