Progressive failure under high-velocity impact on composite laminates: Experiment and phenomenological mesomodeling

This study presents both experimental testing and phenomenological mesomodeling for composite laminates under high-velocity impact. First, we conducted high-velocity impact tests on CFRP laminates and investigated the penetration and damage behaviors. Three kinds of internal damage were observed: fiber breakage, matrix cracking, and delamination. The observed matrix cracks were classified into two categories: multiple (diffuse) cracks around the impact point and large (dominant) cracks on the bottom ply. A phenomenological mesomodel was then developed based on these experiment observations. In the presented model, both continuous and discrete damage models were implemented for modeling two crack configurations. For comparison, we presented two conventional models (one using only the discrete damage model, and the other using only the continuous damage model). To validate the presented model, high-velocity impact simulations were performed, and the predicted results were compared with experiment and conventional models in terms of the damage area and distribution.