A fatigue damage meso-model for fiber-reinforced composites with stress ratio effect

This work presents a fatigue damage meso-model for fiber-reinforced plastic composites, in which the effect of stress ratios on the off-axis fatigue behavior is taken into account. The non-dimensional effective stress concept is introduced in the continuum damage mechanics method. Damage growths and fatigue failure are studied along axial, transverse and shear directions at meso-scale level. The proposed model is validated through numerical simulations that describe the meso fatigue damage accumulation and the fatigue life for off-axis unidirectional fiber-reinforced plastic composite laminates of arbitrary fiber orientation under different stress ratios. It is shown that the fatigue damage behavior and fatigue life for off-axis unidirectional glass/epoxy and carbon/epoxy composite laminates are adequately described by the proposed fatigue model over the range of different stress ratios. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.