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The Effects of Curing Process on the Damage Behavior of Additively Manufactured Fiber-Reinforced Thermosetting Composites

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Abstract

This work investigates the effects of high-temperature curing processes on the stress–strain and failure responses of additively manufactured aligned discontinuous fiber-reinforced composites (DFRCs). A micromechanical framework is used for finite element simulation of damage and failure in the three-dimensional (3-D) representation of DFRCs under mechanical and thermal loadings. Accurate constitutive equations are utilized to explicitly consider the fibers, matrix, and fiber/matrix interfaces within the composite’s microstructure. The coupled thermo-mechanical analysis available on the commercial nonlinear finite element software ABAQUS is used to accurately simulate the response of the studied DFRC when exposed to different curing temperatures and mechanical loading. All material and geometrical parameters of the microstructural representation are defined based on a recently developed 3-D printed aligned discontinuous fiber-reinforced thermosetting polymer. The curing-induced thermal residual stresses and damage are then simulated and validated against the experimental data. The effects of different curing processes on the initiation and propagation of different damage types and on the stress–strain response up to and including final failure are predicted. Also, the impact of the perfect versus cohesive interfacial bonding on the DFRC’s performance is examined. This work reveals that the DFRCs’ responses are significantly affected when residual thermal stresses due to curing are considered, providing guidance for better design, manufacturing, and analysis of such composites.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from the Air-Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award (Award No. FA9550-20-1-0281). The authors also acknowledge Advanced Research Computing at Virginia Tech for providing computational resources and technical support that have contributed to the results reported within this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA

    Sina Niazi & Aimane Najmeddine

  2. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 80303, USA

    Maryam Shakiba

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  1. Sina Niazi
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Correspondence to Sina Niazi.

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Appendix. On Alleviating Mesh-Dependency in the Damage Constitutive Framework

Appendix. On Alleviating Mesh-Dependency in the Damage Constitutive Framework

It is well-known that after the initiation of damage/microcracks within materials, they usually exhibits a softening behavior in their macroscopic stress–strain response, leading to strain localization [52, 53]. Within a traditional finite element framework, this issue would introduce a strong mesh dependency into the results. However, recently in ABAQUS, the damage evolution law in the utilized plasticity damage constitutive framework uses a formulation intended to greatly alleviate the mesh dependency [28]. This is accomplished by implementing Hillerborg’s (1976) fracture energy proposal that introduces a characteristic length, L, into the formulation and expresses the softening part of the constitutive law as a stress-displacement, rather than stress–strain, relation (see [54]). For example, for 2-D elements, the characteristic length is described as the square root of the average area of the mesh elements [28].

Utilizing the characteristic length, the evolution of damage variable, \(\dot{d}\), is calculated in terms of displacement to alleviate the mesh dependency of results (see Eq. (3)). For more information on the damage constitutive framework, readers are referred to [28, 35, 37].

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Niazi, S., Najmeddine, A. & Shakiba, M. The Effects of Curing Process on the Damage Behavior of Additively Manufactured Fiber-Reinforced Thermosetting Composites. Appl Compos Mater 30, 1305–1331 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10443-023-10135-7

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