A refined 1D element for the structural analysis of single and multiple fiber/matrix cells

This paper proposes a one-dimensional (1D) refined formulation for fiber-reinforced laminated composites. It allows simultaneous modeling of fibers and related matrice portions, entire layers and whole multilayers. The capability to carry out the analysis up to the component scales in different locations of the structure leads to a ‘Component-Wise’ (CW) analysis. A single fiber/matrix cell is considered the simplest assessment for the analysis. Cells can be opportunely included in more complex structural configurations to refine the model in order to obtain a more detailed description of the stress/strain field. Given the stress and strain distribution, failure criteria can be taken into account to perform failure analysis. The 1D FE formulation exploited has hierarchical features, that is, 3D stress/strain fields can be easily detected by increasing the order of the 1D model used. The Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF) was exploited to obtain advanced displacement-based theories where the order of the unknown variables over the cross-section is a free parameter of the formulation. Taylor- and Lagrange-type polynomials were used to interpolate the displacement field over the element cross-section. Preliminary assessments with solid model results were made and numerical examples were carried out on different cell configurations. The results presented in this paper show that the current CW formulation provides very accurate displacement/stress fields with low computational costs. The CW approach can be a powerful tool for the analysis of composite structures.