Fibre-reinforced polymer-based composite materials fail due to a wide variety of interacting
damage mechanisms, which require complex constitutive models in order to develop
Finite Element (FE) predictive analysis. In the design of automotive components,
the whole body of the vehicle is needed to be modelled for certain simulations. This
makes necessary a computationally-efficient constitutive model in order to get a proper
definition of its behaviour. In this master thesis, the model published by Mart´ın-Santos
et al. in 2013 is taken as a reference, in order to take advantadge of the simplified loading
functions and the reduced mesh influence in the results due to the implementation of the
Crack Band Methodology.
In this work, the model is upgraded to be able to reproduce the behaviour of a wider
range of materials than the original model, and to become more stable in simulations
regarding extreme loading conditions, as the crushing of the composite due to an axial
impact event. The proposed constitutive model is implemented in Pam-Crash FE code,
in order to take advantage of its well-proved experience in explicit analysis of specimens
under dynamic loads in the automotive industry.
The implementation is validated by comparing the results of FE predictions with experimental
data from delamination and low-velocity impact tests. A good correlation
between the numerical and experimental results is achieved when using a bilinear cohesive
law, for the different models.
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