Simulation of Progressive Damage Development in Braided Composite Tubes Undergoing Dynamic Axial Crushing

Composite tubular structures are of interest as viable energy absorbing components in vehicular front rail structures to improve crashworthiness. Desirable tools in designing such structures are models capable of simulating damage growth in composite materials. CODAM (COmposite DAMage), which is incorporated into LS- DYNA as a user material model, is a continuum damage mechanics based model for composite materials with physically based input parameters. In this paper, the CODAM model is used to simulate tube crush experiments. It is shown that the damage propagation, fracture morphology and energy absorption predictions correlate well with the experimental results.