This presentation was held at the 2020 NAFEMS UK Conference "Inspiring Innovation through Engineering Simulation". The conference covered topics ranging from traditional FEA and CFD, to new and emerging areas including artificial intelligence, machine learning and EDA.

Resource Abstract

There is growing interest in composite manufacturing industry for material solutions that offer superior specific strength, stiffness and fracture toughness while allowing for faster production rates and having lower material costs than existing materials. These are conflicting objectives and a hybrid combination of continuous and discontinuous fibre composites is a promising way forward. The development in this field is impeded because of the lack of appropriate simulation tools that can accurately and computationally efficiently reflect the material behaviour, which is highly influenced by not only the constituent properties, but also by the complex multidimensional material architecture which spans various length scales. Further development in this domain can be speeded up if appropriate simulation tools are made available to the designers, which seamlessly integrate in the existing FEA packages and require little expert knowledge for implementation on large scale industry relevant parts and structures.

In this context we discuss our recently developed approach that can be used to efficiently simulate the material behaviour of components and structures made from random and hybrid discontinuous tow-based fibre reinforced polymeric composites. The proposed algorithm allows us to generate a realistic meso level representation of the random fibre and hybrid composites using shell elements through a numerically efficient scheme which is scalable for larger parts. Embedded element approach is then used to couple the meso and macro level response of the structure to carry out an accurate strength and stiffness prediction. Some of the challenges that have been overcome include the ability to capture the random change in, thickness, volume fraction, out-of-plane orientation, in-plane orientation, tow geometry and tow material, in a statistically accurate manner. This approach allows for generation of higher volume fraction discontinuous and hybrid fibre composites without penetrations and without having unrealistic fibre paths.

In this presentation, the validity of the approach has been demonstrated by discussing its implementation through python scripting in ABAQUS FEA package and comparing against experimental results available in literature. The approach is generic in principle and can be easily implemented through many other finite element packages.