Incorporation of Material Model into LS-DYNA Implicit to Model the Shear Behavior of Uncured Woven-Fabric Composite Materials

A shear-frame FE model for use in the LS-DYNA implicit code was created to predict the forming behavior of an uncured woven-fabric composite material. This FE model contains fully integrated shell elements and beam elements. A material model developed by McBride and Chen for plain-weave woven composite materials and later refined by Bulusu and Chen to account for different fabric weaves was incorporated into LS-DYNA implicit to model the behavior of a 40-60 glass-polypropylene satin-weave fabric as the fabric deformed in a shear-frame experiment. The normalized force-displacement results from the FE model were compared to the experimental results.