MICROMECHANICAL MODELING OF 8 HARNESS SATIN WEAVE GLASS FIBER REINFORCED PHENOLIC COMPOSITES USING FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS

Abstract

Composite industry is currently entering into a mature phase; however, the lack of reliable composites property database poses a big challenge to designers as their properties cannot be directly taken from material handbooks. In Pakistan, Composite Industry is nurturing in the field of sports goods, daily consumer items and structural engineering applications where high grade composites are currently being utilized. All these industries will be benefited if material properties for design of products are readily available. Currently, the property prediction process of composites is done either by using the experimental methods or by employing various numerical and analytical approaches. Analytical approaches are not yet fully developed for complicated architectures whereas experimental methods involve expensive equipment. Numerical methods like FEM can however, capture the effects of complicated architectures and thus can provide the best estimates for effective properties of the composites. Keeping above in view, this study aims to develop a micromechanical finite element (FE) model to approximate the effective orthotropic properties of 8-harness satin weave glass fiber reinforced phenolic (GFRP) composites. For the geometric model, measurements taken from X-Ray Microtomography images are used in TEXGEN 3.5.2 to generate the Representative Volume Element (RVE) of the composite under study. After providing constituent properties and applying Periodic Boundary Conditions, the RVE is imported in ABAQUS 6.10.1 to carry out the simulation using the implicit solver. Material properties extracted from the FE simulation are then compared with the available experimental database for the material under investigation. After validation, the FE model is further utilized to predict the unknown effective properties of the same composite that are usually difficult to be determined experimentally. Numerically approximated macroscopic properties showed good agreement with the available experimental data. Thus, it can be fairly concluded that the same methodology may be adopted to develop FE micromechanical models for 2D as well 3D composites with appropriate alterations in their respective geometric models. This practice may help in determining the material characteristics of composites with various geometries which will surely facilitate the design processes related to the fields of aerospace, automotive, infrastructure, armor, renewable energy and bio-engineering.