Inversion of elastic constants of composite materials by single test based on virtual fields method

Abstract

In this paper, a method of obtaining four elastic constants of orthotropic composites by single tensile test is proposed. The principle of this method is to obtain the full field strain on the surface of the specimen through the tensile test of the specimen with a specific geometry, and to invert the measured in-plane strain field into the virtual fields method (VFM) to obtain the elastic constants. Based on the deformation field data generated by finite element numerical simulation, the effects of design parameters such as effective length, notch position, notch size and fillet radius on the identification results of elastic parameters of V-notch tensile specimen are studied. The results show that the inversion results of symmetrical V-notch specimen with 50 mm length, 12 mm notch size and 3.1 mm fillet radius are the best, and the sum of absolute relative errors of four elastic constants is less than 3%, which verifies the feasibility of the method.