Development and implementation of robust large deformation and contact mechanics capabilities in process modelling of composites

• Main Author: Osooly, Amir
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2008
• Subjects: Composite material; Large deformation and stain
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/747

Autoclave processing of large scale, one-piece structural parts made of carbon fiber-reinforced polymer composite materials is the key to decreasing manufacturing costs while at the same time increasing quality. Nonetheless, even in manufacturing simple flat parts, residual strains and stresses are unavoidable. For structural design purposes and to aid in the assembly procedures, it is desirable to have proven numerical tools that can be used to predict these residual geometrical and material properties in advance, thus avoid the costly experimental trial and error methods. A 2-D finite element-based code, COMPRO, has previously been developed in-house for predicting autoclave process-induced deformations and residual stresses in composite parts undergoing an entire cure cycle. To simulate the tool-part interaction, an important source of residual deformations/stresses, COMPRO used a non-zero thickness elastic shear layer as its only interface option. Moreover, the code did not account for the large deformations and strains and the resulting nonlinear effects that can arise during the early stages of the cure cycle when the material is rather compliant. In the present work, a contact surface employing a penalty method formulation is introduced at the tool-part interface. Its material-dependent parameters are a function of temperature, degree of cure, pressure and so forth. This makes the stick-slip condition plus separation between the part and the tool possible. The large displacements/rotations and large shear strains that develop at the early stages of the cure cycle when the resin has a very low elastic modulus provided the impetus to include a large strain/deformation option in COMPRO. A new “co-rotational stress formulation” was developed and found to provide a robust method for numerical treatment of very large deformation/strain problems involving anisotropic materials of interest here. Several verification and validation examples are used to calibrate the contact interface parameters and to demonstrate the correctness of implementation and the accuracy of the proposed method. A number of comparisons are made with exact solutions, other methods, other experiments and the same models in other commercial codes. Finally, several interesting cases are examined to explore the results of COMPRO predictions with the added options. === Applied Science, Faculty of === Civil Engineering, Department of === Graduate