Rapid Predicting the Impact Behaviors of Marine Composite Laminates

There are challenges of using composite laminates in the marine engineering, i.e., composites are frequently suffering from the effects of impaction including wave impaction, ship or other objects hitting, missiles or bullets hitting and other especially conditions. It is significant to understand the impact behaviors of laminates, in this research, the impact responses of typical laminates are investigated numerically. The delamination responses among the plies and fibre and/or matrix damage responses within the plies are simulated to understand the impaction behaviours of laminates under impaction conditions. The impact damage of composite laminates in the form of intra- and/or inter-laminar cracking is modelled by using stress-based criteria for damage initiation, and fracture mechanics technique is used to capture its evolution. Interface cohesive elements are inserted between plies with appropriate mixed-mode damage laws to predict the delamination. A group of graphite fibre/epoxy laminates with impact energies of 5, 10, 15 and 20 J, respectively, are simulated with a full scale FE model and a simplified FE model respectively. Through comparing the simulation results with each other, we find out that the impact behaviors obtained in the simplified FE model is comparable to experiments with a short computing time, but the simplified model cannot represent the properties of laminate after impact.