Impact Resistance of Composite Structures

A new approach based concepts of the Discrete Element Method, is presented for impact resistance analysis of composites. The method is capable of analysing the progressive fracturing and fragmentation behaviour as well as potential post cracking interactions caused by the newly created crack sides and segments. The imminence of a material crack is monitored by an anisotropic Hoffman model . To avoid the mesh dependency of the results, a bilinear local softening model is also adopted in this study to account for release of energy and redistribution of forces which caused the formation of a crack. A special re-meshing method has been developed to geometrically model an individual crack by splitting the element, separating the failed node, creating new nodes and dividing the neighbouring elements to preserve the compatibility conditions. Several numerical simulations have been performed to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm which covers a variety of benchmark finite element tests, standard experimental data and practical applications.