Forming Simulation of Woven Composite Fibers and Its Influence on Crash Performance

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The automotive industry, in its constant quest for weight reduction, is increasingly considering composite materials as a substitute for sheet metal components to meet future fuel consumption standards. However, composite forming processes are expensive and difficult to control because of the complexity of the material behavior with fiber and matrix layers or plies and its dependency on many parameters, such as non-linearity of tensile stiffness, effect of shear rate, temperature and friction. Hence, numerical simulation could be a viable approach to predict material behavior during composite forming. The objective of this study is to highlight capabilities of RADIOSS™ to simulate forming simulation of composite plies made from woven fibers, each ply modeled as a layer of woven fibers along two directions of anisotropy, warp and weft. For validation the well-known double dome model published in NUMISHEET’05 proceedings is used. The compared result is the shear angle after stamping that is, the final angle between warp and weft fibers, at several prescribed points on the ply. The variation of this angle has a strong impact on material characteristics which severely deteriorates when a critical value is reached. Hence, a study on crash simulations is performed, after mapping fibers angles from stamping simulation.

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