Objectives
Components made of SFRP are typically manufactured via injection molding. Hereby, the resulting local microstructural configuration of the composite, i.e. the spatial arrangement of the fibers, highly influences the deformation and failure behaviour of the macroscopic component.
Later in the application, products are exposed to harsh environments and severe operational loads. Aiming at the development of products with high reliability requirements in a time- and cost-efficient manner, simulation methods with high accuracy predictions and efficient adaption routines are becoming increasingly important. To achieve this, robust multiscale techniques must be established that contain elements of virtual material testing where a large portion of the required experiments are transferred to the virtual or numerical world.
Clearly, this requires a model on the microscopic scale that captures all relevant failure mechanisms like fiber fracture, cavitation fracture at fiber tips, and matrix fracture. In this context, PF models for fracture are promising approaches, as they can be employed to describe highly complex fracture processes in very complicated 3D microstructures. With precise microscopic models at hand that are validated with non-standard microscopic experiments, numerous simulations are performed with highly efficient Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) solvers.
In line with concepts of data-driven modeling strategies, effective material laws for the macroscopic component scale are derived based on closed form approaches or on modern model order reduction techniques which are fed by the previously performed microstructural simulations.
The 1st objective of this ESR project is to deliver variationalbased robust PF models for fracture that can be employed to predict damage progression on the microstructural level for complex operational loads. In order to achieve this, experiments on the microscale of the composites will be carried out to make the main failure mechanisms visible and to motivate the specific PF modeling approaches. Having the microscopic model at hand, the 2nd objective of this ESR project is the derivation of a suitable effective model that can be employed for component simulations that are performed with commercial FEM packages