Simulation of progressive damage development in braided composite tubes under axial compression

A continuum damage mechanics based model for composite materials (CODAM), which has been implemented as a user material model in an explicit finite element code (LS-DYNA), is used to capture the complete tensile and compressive response of a braided composite material. Model parameters are related to experimentally observed behaviour to ensure a physical basis to the model and a crack band scaling approach is used to minimize mesh sensitivity (or lack of objectivity) of the numerical results. The predictive capability of the model is validated against the results from dynamic tube crush experiments. The damage propagation, failure morphology and energy absorption predictions correlate well with the experimental results.