Peridynamic Analysis of Marine Composites under Shock Loads by Considering Thermomechanical Coupling Effects

Nowadays, composite materials have been increasingly used in marine structures because of their high performance properties. During their service time, they may be exposed to extreme loading conditions such as underwater explosions. Temperature changes induced by pure mechanical shock loadings cannot to be neglected especially when smart composite materials are employed for condition monitoring of critical systems in a marine structure. Considering this fact, both the thermal loading effect on deformation and the deformation effect on temperature need to be taken into consideration. Consequently, an analysis conducted in a fully coupled thermomechanical manner is necessary. Peridynamics is a newly proposed non-local theory which can predict failures without extra assumptions. Therefore, a fully coupled thermomechanical peridynamic model is developed for laminated composites materials. In this study, numerical analysis of a 13 ply laminated composite subjected to an underwater explosion is conducted by using the developed model. The pressure shocks generated by the underwater explosion are applied on the top surface of the laminate for uniform and non-uniform load distributions. The damage is predicted and compared with existing experimental results. The simulation results obtained from uncoupled case are also provided for comparison. Thus the coupling term effects on crack propagation paths are investigated. Furthermore, the corresponding temperature distributions are also investigated.