Mechanism for Predicting the Progressive Failure of Natural Fiber-Based Composites

Abstract

The present study deals with the numerical investigation of buckling and postbuckling responses and failure of natural fiber-based composites and synthetic fiber-reinforced polymer composites under uni-axial compression. The unidirectional fibers are used for the composite aligned with the (0/90) directions. The plates are modelled using general purpose software Abaqus. All the edges of the plate are simply supported. By implementing the linear buckling analysis, the buckling load has been determined. Using the non-linear analysis and static Riks procedure, the composite's postbuckling behavior has also been predicted. The Tsai hill failure criterion is incorporated in the numerical analysis to predict the first-ply failure in the composite. In this study, three different composite models, i.e., Glass, Carbon and Flax fiber-reinforced composites are considered for the analysis. It is observed that the carbon fiber composite has the better buckling load capacity and the first ply failure load compared to glass and flax fiber-reinforced composites. It is further observed that the flax fiber-reinforced composite performs comparatively similar to the glass fiber reinforced composite. Based on the results, it is expected that the glass fiber reinforced composite can be replaced by the flax fiber-reinforced composites. In this study, the ultimate load has been considered when the plate is unable to take any further load in analysis. To precisely predict the ultimate failure of a composite, a methodology has been proposed to undertake the progressive failure analysis of composite by incorporating the UMAT subroutine in the Abaqus.