A coupled thermo‐chemo‐mechanical reduced‐order multiscale model for predicting process‐induced distortions, residual stresses, and strength

Abstract

Summary We study residual stresses and part distortion induced by a manufacturing process of a polymer matrix composite and its effect on the component strength. Unlike most of the thermo‐chemo‐mechanical models in the literature where governing multiphysics equations are directly formulated on the macroscale, we present a multiscale‐multiphysics approach. To address the enormous computational complexity involved, a reduced‐order homogenization was originally developed for a single physics problem is employed. The proposed reduced‐order two‐scale thermo‐chemo‐mechanical model has been validated for predicting part distortion beam strength in three‐point bending test. It is shown that while macroscopic stresses are relatively low, and therefore often ignored in practice, stresses at the scale of microconstituents are significant and may have an effect on the overall composite component strength.

Curing-Induced Residual Stress and Strain in Thermoset Composites

“…Computationally efficient multiscale process modeling is needed to predict curing-induced residual stresses accurately [7]. Different numerical techniques can reproduce the relevant fundamental physics across the relevant scales in fiber-reinforced composites, including the evolution of the mechanical and non-mechanical properties of the matrix as a function of curing, local fiber constraint of the curing matrix, thermal gradients, and stress concentrations induced by complex tow architectures [8][9][10][11][12][13]. Recent work proved that it is possible to virtually reproduce the crosslinking formation of the polymer during curing at the nano-scale using Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations [14,15].…”

Data‐physics driven reduced order homogenization

“…We refer to References 28–30 for recent review articles on multiscale methods with and without model reduction and their practical applications. For integrated reduced order multiscale methods applied to coupled process‐product design cycle we refer to References 31–35.…”

A decoupling scheme for two‐scale finite thermoviscoelasticity with thermal and cure‐induced deformations

“…Nevertheless, the high computational cost required for solving practical problems has been disputed 11 and difficult to resolve. Probably because of this issue, thermomechanical coupled FE 2 ‐type computations for manufacturing processes of FRPs have never been tried in the literature and instead the reduced‐order homogenization approach has been proposed by Yuan et al 21 to simulate the manufacturing process of FRP products.…”