Significance of material characterization in FE Modeling of glass fabric/epoxy composite shell structure using LSDYNA®

Abstract

This article emphasis on material characterization and testing of a fabric composite material which form the basic building block of laminated composite structures. The study prescribed in this paper investigates the importance of material characterization in Finite Element Analysis (FEA) pre-processor, as design and analysis of any composite structures requires the input of material property data. A generic experimental testing procedure is developed in this paper aimed at characterization and testing of glass fabric/epoxy composite under uni-axial tensile loading condition. A finite element analysis procedure which describes the axial compression of thin-walled glass fabric/epoxy composite shell structure under impact loading is presented in this paper. The finite element analysis for the present studies was made with the explicit finite element software LSDYNA® wherein the experimentally determined material properties of glass fabric/epoxy composite are incorporated into the FEModel. Low velocity impact experiments are also conducted for the validation of numerical model using LSDYNA®. A study of fracture mechanism of the glass fabric/epoxy composite using Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) is also carried out in this paper.