A virtual material point peridynamic model for failure investigation of anisotropic laminated composites

Abstract

In this study, a new virtual material point peridynamic model (abbreviated as VMPPD) is proposed to capture the fracture behavior of composite laminates with arbitrary fiber orientation. The unique feature is that virtual material points serve as intermediate variables to achieve load transfer in a regularized discrete grid. As a result, a PD model for describing the reinforcement characteristics of composite materials was developed, and the limitation for these conventional PD models in characterizing fiber orientation was overcome. In the damage stage, the damage state and mechanical characteristics of composite materials are described by stiffness reduction technique to four material points rather than permanent termination to one material point. Furthermore, it is very convenient to introduce the concept of single-layer algorithms for multi-layer laminated structures under the VMPPD framework to achieve high efficiency. The tensile example of laminates has demonstrated that the VMPPD model can accurately predict the anisotropic characteristics of composite materials with a reliable numerical accuracy. It can also be observed from the matrix-dominated composite example that the fracture behavior of the laminate can be adaptively captured without any other numerical guidance techniques.