Progressive Failure Analysis of Composite Materials Using the Puck Failure Criteri

Fiber reinforced composites have been used in various engineering structures and applications especially in naval, automotive, aeronautical and sports industries. These composite materials generally exhibit brittle damage behavior. The anisotropy in the material and different kinds of failure mechanisms make it difficult to accurately characterize the behavior of composite materials. There have been many failure criteria proposed in literature.;In the present work, the progressive failure of composite materials is analyzed using the Puck failure criteria to detect damage initiation. The Puck failure criteria is a robust, versatile criterion which can be used for the progressive failure analysis of continuous fiber unidirectional composite laminates. The ABAQUS user-defined material subroutine UMAT was developed to apply the failure criteria. The model is implemented with two different post failure degradation schemes. A partial discount method and a gradual stiffness degradation method is implemented and the results using these degradation models are compared. The model was validated using experimental data and digital image correlation (DIC) performed on a single layer lamina with a central hole loaded under tension. A second validation was conducted by comparing the failure loads of composite laminates with a central hole and different stacking sequences, loaded under inplane tension that are available in literature with the failure loads predicted by the model. The validation cases confirmed that the model results were in good agreement with the experimental results.