Finite element guidelines for simulation of fibre-tension dominated failures in composite materials validated by case studies

This paper presents a finite element modelling methodology to predict the initiation and damage progression in notched composite laminated plates subjected to increasing in-plane tension load. An important feature of the methodology is it does not rely on customized user-subroutines but solely on the analysis capabilities of the general purpose software Abaqus; thus ensuring that the numerical results can be universally reproduced. The methodology presented copes with intralaminar failure modes and uses the Hashin failure criterion to predict the onset of failure (cracking). To account for damage progression after crack initiation there is a fracture energy calculated for each of four failure modes. Four open-hole laminated plates taken from the literature are used for benchmark examples. The predicted ultimate strength based on the analytically-obtained stress-displacement curve was found to be within 10% of the experimental observations. To study the influence of the interaction of having two or three holes across the mid-plane of a pultruded open-hole tension specimen, a parametric study was carried out. The paper ends giving guidelines for the generalized modelling methodology using Abaqus without user-subroutines.