Abstract
In woven fabric composite materials, several kinds of failure mode such as matrix cracking, fiber breaking and transverse cracking in fiber bundle occur at frequent intervals under monotonic loading condition. The damage mechanism is very complicated and difficult to reveal by experiments. Hence, three-dimensional finite element analysis based on damage mechanics has been developed. Anisotropic damage equation for unidirectional lamina is applied to fiber bundle and microscopic damage development is simulated by incremental method. In addition to the procedure of damage development analysis, the technique to generate finite element mesh for heterogeneous body composed of weaving fiber bundle and matrix is presented. For the numerical example, the damage development of plain woven fabric composite material under on-axis tensile load has been analyzed and has been observed by CCD camera. As a results, it is recognized that the calculational and the experimental results have a good agreement and that the proposed procedure is very useful for the design of structures using woven fabric composite materials.
