Assessment of Intra-Laminar Macro-Damage in Textile Composite Using Gradient-Enhanced Continuum Damage Mechanics Method

Although textile composites have been popular over laminated composites, their complex fiber architecture poses hurdles in modeling and predicting material behavior under various static and dynamic conditions. The development of an effective methodology for capturing the material response to macro-damage onset and evolution is even more challenging. The present work discusses the intra-laminar macro-damage initiation and evolution in the plain woven textile composite. A two-step homogenization approach is employed to deduce the effective properties of the composite material which are then used in developing the strain-damage coupled constitutive equations. Gradient-enhanced continuum mechanics technique is used to tackle the localization issues due to mesh sensitivity in otherwise vastly efficient and popular continuum damage mechanics method. The numerical solution is evaluated with the help of ABAQUS user element subroutine (UEL) via nonlinear finite element solution techniques. The material response to macro-damage initiation and evolution is observed to be consistent with the experimental data thus validating the efficiency and accuracy of the present work.