Finite Element Modeling of Carbon Fiber Composite Orthogonal Cutting and Drilling

Carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) is widely used in the aerospace industry. It has been observed that, during drilling of this material, micromechanical damage, delamination and fiber pullout are highly dependent on the orientation of the fibers. Current computational schemes have been unsuccessful in predicting this effect. We present a finite element scheme using a nonlinear, large deformation Lagrangian formulation with an explicit time integration, which is employed with cohesive element insertion [1,2,12] and structured mesh element splitting. We model the workpiece as a structured mesh superimposed upon the fiber orientation and the laminar plane, with the fracture planes defined by the Miller index. This procedure allows the crack propagation path to be guided by fiber orientation. We validate our simulation procedure against experiments for four fiber orientations -,,, and .