A study of composite laminates failure using an anisotropic gradient-enhanced damage mean-field homogenization model

The failure of carbon fiber reinforced epoxy laminates is studied using an anisotropic gradient-enhanced continuum damage model embedded in a mean-field homogenization scheme. In each ply, a homogenized material law is used to capture the intra-laminar failure. The anisotropy of the homogenized material model results from the homogenization method and from the reformulation of the non-local continuum damage theory to account for the material anisotropy. As a result the damage propagation direction in each ply is predicted with accuracy as compared to the experimental results, while the problems of losing uniqueness and strain localization, which occur in classical finite element simulations when strain softening of materials is involved, can be avoided. To model the delamination process, the hybrid discontinuous Galerkin/extrinsic cohesive law method is introduced at the ply interfaces. This hybrid method avoids the need to propagate topological changes in the mesh with the propagation of the delamination while it preserves the consistency and stability in the un-cracked interfaces. As a demonstration, open-hole coupons with different stacking sequences are studied numerically and experimentally. Both the intra- and inter-laminar failure patterns are shown to be well captured by the computational framework. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.