Modeling ablation of laminated composites: A novel manual mesh moving finite element analysis procedure with ABAQUS

•ABAQUS subroutine UMESHMOTION cannot model ablation for composite laminates.•A new FEA procedure is proposed to model ablation of composite laminates in ABAQUS.•The new procedure is verified with simulations using existing validated method.•The ablation of a CFRP composite laminate is captured using the new procedure.

The recent improvements of the commercial, general purpose Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software have allowed them to be used for modeling ablation problems. ABAQUS for example, provides a user-subroutine UMESHMOTION along with the Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) adaptive remesh algorithm that enable the users to couple the heat transfer with the progressive surface recession (i.e., ablation). However, such a numerical capability is limited to model ablation problems when the ablation front (i.e., receding surface) is confined within a single material domain (e.g., homogenous material). For ablation problems when the ablation front proceeds from one material domain to another (e.g., laminated composite materials that consist of multiple laminate layers with different material orientations), such a numerical capability is insufficient, since the mesh is not allowed to flow from one material domain to another when the UMESHMOTION subroutine is used. In this paper, a novel computational procedure that sequentially performs the general heat transfer analysis and the general static analysis in ABAQUS, is proposed enabling the capability of ABAQUS for modeling ablation of laminated composites. The proposed procedure is verified by comparing the predictions of temperature and ablation histories of a two-dimensional isotropic panel (i.e., with single material domain) with those obtained using the traditional UMESHMOTION + ALE method. In addition, a case study of applying the proposed procedure to predict the thermal and ablation response of a laminated carbon fiber reinforced epoxy matrix (CFRP) composite panel subjected to a high-intensity and short-duration radiative heat flux is demonstrated.