Effect of fibre bundle uncertainty on the tensile and shear behaviour of plain-woven composites

Abstract

The development of woven composites has led to an increase in the number of investigations on the uncertainty of the intricate fibre architecture and its effect on the mechanical properties. The present work proposes a simplified method to study fibre architecture by means of microscopy analysis of cross-sections. The approach is based on multiscale numerical simulations including mesoscale and macroscale models, in which the mesoscale model provide the mechanical parameters exploited as input to the macroscale model, which produces reliable and efficient outputs in engineering applications. Two types of distributions, uniform and normal, were used in the macroscale model to describe the variable fibre architecture parameters, and the normal distribution was found to be more suitable. Both aramid-fibre and glass-fibre woven composites, under two different loading conditions, tension and shear, were investigated, and the results showed the importance of considering the shear behaviour in engineering applications.

Numerical investigation on the uniaxial compressive behaviour of an epoxy resin and a nanocomposite

“…Considering the stochastic distribution of these defects inside polymer materials, homogeneous approaches, like finite element (FE) method, might be unsuitable to accurately describe the uncertainties of mechanical responses (Park and Cho, 2020). However, by applying the Monte Carlo method combined with the introduction of defect-related parameters and statistical distributions (Ma et al, 2021a;Ozturk et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2021), the mechanical response of the polymer materials can be reconstructed in a numerical environment. However, most of the existing works of defectrelated analysis focused on the tensile and fracture cases, while compressive cases have been considered less due to the complexity of the fracture behaviours and the failure criteria implemented in the numerical calculation.…”

An Efficient Anti-Optimization Approach for Uncertainty Analysis in Composite Laminates

“…Many methods for evaluating uncertainty in composites have been developed over the past few decades. Several versions of SFEM (Stochastic Finite Element Method) have been proposed to approach the uncertainty problem, such as [10][11][12][13][14] . More recently, anti-optimization has emerged as a viable alternative to solve uncertainties problems in laminates [15][16][17] .…”

“…Some authors, such as 14,24-26, use multiple instances of the aforementioned approaches, called multi-scale analysis. Using a multi-scale analysis (meso and macro-scale) 14,26 , the authors applied the Representative Volume Element (RVE) method coupled with finite element analysis to produce better results when compared with Monte Carlo alone. Since the present paper uses ply level properties, it fits into the meso-scale category 4 .…”

“…The Monte Carlo approach is also useful for this concern, being a robust solution to the uncertainty propagation problem. As explained in 2 , the Monte Carlo simulation technique in conjunction with the finite element (FE) method is widely used for quantifying uncertainties of laminated composite structures, as it is done in 3,14 . The comparison between the Monte Carlo and the anti-optimization approach is explored later in this work, where it is shown that Monte Carlo is not the best choice regarding performance and efficiency.…”