Multi-Scale Modeling of the Impact and Failure of Fiber Reinforced Polymer Structures using DIGIMAT to LS-DYNA Interface

This paper deals with the prediction of the overall behavior of polymer matrix composites and structures, based on mean-field homogenization. We present the basis of the mean-field homogenization incremental formulation and illustrate the method through the analysis of the impact properties of fiber reinforced structures. The present formulation is part of the DIGIMAT [1] software developed by e-Xstream engineering. An interface between LS-DYNA and DIGIMAT was developed in order to perform multi-scale FE analysis of these composite structures taking into account the local, anisotropic, nonlinear and strain-rate dependent behavior of the material. Impact simulations are performed on glass fiber reinforced polymer structures using DIGIMAT interface to LS-DYNA. These analyses enable to highlight the sensitivity of the impact properties to the fibers’ concentration, orientation and length.