The usage of advanced lightweight materials such as polymer based compositesis one direction to meet today’s requirements and regulations regarding energyefficiency. This is especially true for the automotive industry, where the usage oflightweight components can substantially lower the fuel consumption. However,sometimes these components carry critical structural loads and represent key safetyparts. Therefore being able to predict by simulation the crash and strength performanceof such materials is crucial starting in the early stages of the design process.State of the art mechanical simulation software not only provide elastic stiffnessproperties, they aim at predicting the progressive damage and failure limits of thecomposite part. However, the available damage and failure models may only be able topredict the point of damage initiation or suffer from numerical drawbacks such as astrong mesh dependence. Therefore, numerous research teams focus on thedevelopment of both robust and accurate progressive damage models for composites. Apromising approach has been published recently by Pineda and Waas [1]. It is based onthe definition of characteristic failure planes and the internal transition from acontinuum to a cohesive based formulation. The damage model has been successfullyimplemented in the FE software package ESI Virtual Performance Solution (VPS). Thisallows for an explicit simulation of complex composite structures under dynamicloading such as they occur in a crash simulation.The implementation is subsequently evaluated for a variety of test cases andcompared with standard continuum based formulations. The investigated models rangefrom simple coupon tests to complex crash models.
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