Progressive Damage Simulation of Thick Viscoelastic Laminate with Homogenization Technique

Abstract

For a thick viscoelastic laminate, modeling of individual lamina and cracks is impractical because it requires huge computational expense. To reduce the computational time, homogenization methods at the lamina and sublaminate (groups of plies) levels were used to develop a progressive damage analysis of viscoelastic laminates with transverse matrix cracks. At the lamina level, homogenization is used to determine the effective lamina properties, which are degraded due to matrix cracks. At the sublaminate level, the effective properties of sublaminates were obtained from effective lamina properties using the sublaminate homogenization method. The current study focused on combining these methods to develop an efficient progressive damage analysis of thick laminates that accounts for the effect of the time-history of matrix cracking and viscoelasticity. Examples of the progressive damage analysis are provided. The study showed that the multilevel homogenization technique developed herein for progressive damage analysis of a thick viscoelastic laminate with cracks is very efficient and accurate.