Microplane model for fracturing damage of triaxially braided fiber-polymer composites

A material model for the fracturing behavior for braided composites is developed and implemented in a material subroutine for use in the commercial explicit finite element code ABAQUS. The subroutine is based on the microplane model in which the constitutive behavior is defined not in terms of stress and strain tensors and their invariants but in terms of stress and strain vectors in the material mesostructure called the "microplanes." This is a semi-multiscale model, which captures the interactions between inelastic phenomena such as cracking, splitting, and frictional slipping occurring on planes of various orientations though not the interactions at a distance. To avoid spurious mesh sensitivity due to softening, the crack band model is adopted. Its band width, related to the material characteristic length, serves as the localization limiter. It is shown that the model can realistically predict the orthotropic elastic constants and the strength limits. More importantly, the present model can also fit the tests of size effect on the strength of notched specimens and the post-peak behavior, which have been conducted for this purpose. When used in the ABAQUS software, the model gives a realistic picture of the axial crushing of a braided tube by a divergent plug.