K. Woo et Jd. Whitcomb, 3-DIMENSIONAL FAILURE ANALYSIS OF PLAIN WEAVE TEXTILE COMPOSITES USING A GLOBAL LOCAL FINITE-ELEMENT METHOD/, Journal of composite materials, 30(9), 1996, pp. 984-1003
Textile composites are known to have improved out-of-plane properties
and impact resistance. However, detailed analysis of textile composite
s is very difficult to perform due to the geometric complexity. In the
present study, a practical computational procedure based on a global/
local finite element method was developed for detailed analysis of tex
tile composites. This procedure utilizes two problem levels: global an
d local levels. At the global level, an initial global solution was ob
tained using a coarse global mesh. At the local level, a small portion
of the textile composite was modeled with a refined local mesh. For t
he global analysis, macroelements were used since the use of effective
engineering properties are not in general accurate for the larger mic
rostructural scale found in textile composites. Results indicated that
the failure behavior of plain weave textile composites was sensitive
to the fiber bundle waviness. The initial failure mode was the fiber b
undle separation when the waviness ratio was large while it was the fi
ber bundle fracture when the waviness ratio was small. It was also fou
nd that the stress distributions near the free surface were different
from those inside. The stress level was much higher inside than near t
he free surface. However, the boundary region was shallow and was limi
ted to the outer-most layer.