A fatigue damage model of composite materials

Fuqiang Wu WeiXing Yao Key Laboratory of Fundamental Science for National Defense-Advanced Design Technology of Flight Vehicle, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics Nanjing 210016, China E-mail: stonefuq@hotmail.com Tel: 86-25-84892576 Keywords: composite, fatigue, accumulative damage, predicted life. 1. Introduction The damage evolution mechanism is one of the important focuses of fatigue behavior investigation of composite materials and also is the foundation to predict fatigue life of composite structures for engineering application. In this paper, the factors related to fatigue damage development of composite were analyzed and a phenomenological fatigue damage model defined by material stiffness degradation was mentioned. Thirteen sets of experimental data were employed to verify the model, and the results show that the model can describe the damage evolution of composite laminates under the different fatigue loading. And it is also verified that the model can predict residual fatigue life of composite laminates quite well by four sets of twolevel experimental data. 2. Damage model Under cyclic stress or strain, the non-inverse structurally change will occur in micro local field in composite materials and these changes form fatigue damage of composites. To test the change of Youngs modulus of materials, the damage development of composite materials can be described by stiffness degradation of materials in fatigue behavior investigation. Based on this technique that spends less experimental time and cost, many non linear damage evolution models [8] were presented. And it is widely investigated theoretically and experimentally that the models defined by stiffness degradation of composite laminates and they fairly described the damage progress in the beginning or/and middle period of the fatigue life. However, they are no capability to fit the damage progress in the whole period, as shows in the Fig 1. According to the fatigue mechanisms of composite, a versatile new fatigue damage model is presented to describe the stiffness degradation rule of composite materials in the loading direction. The proposed model of the damage is that

n B E E ( n) D( n ) = 0 = 1 1 N E0 E f

(1)

where E0 is initial Youngs modulus, Ef is the failure Youngs modulus, E(n) is the Youngs modulus of material subjected to the nth cycling loading, n is the cycle, N is fatigue life, A and B are model parameters, D(n) is fatigue damage, which equals 0 when n = 0 and equals 1 when n = N. 3. Statistical analysis In equation (1), the normalization fatigue life n/N is rewrote as x = n/N. Then, the rate of damage development of laminate is

dD = ABx B 1 1 x B dx

A1

(2)

Based on the characteristics of damage evolution of composite materials, the rates of damage development between the beginning period and the final period of fatigue life are same, as shown as in Fig 3. Then, an assumption is proposed, which is the rates at any normalization life x1 and x2 (0<x1< x2<1) are same. From the
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equation (2), the parameters A and B can be expressed as

x1 x2 A = 1 + ( B 1) B 1 x2 lg 1 x1B lg

(3)

It can be verified mathematically that the relation between A and B in equation (3) approximates the linear relation, when the x1 and x2 are discretionarily given. Therefore, the equation (3) can be approximately expressed as

A = pB + q

(4)

where p and q are constants. To fit the values of parameters A and B, as shown as in Table 1, a quantitative relationship between the parameters is proposed (5) A = 0.67 B + 0.44 4. Damage accumulation When the composite materials subject to the constant amplitude fatigue loading, the damage development of materials can be described by equation (1). Under the variable amplitude fatigue loading, the damage that produced in the former stage loading will affect the damage that produced in the next stage loading. Then, the cumulative fatigue damage D(n) in composite materials subject to the ith loading is calculated as

n + n Bi D ( ni ) = 1 1 i i ,i 1 Ni

Ai

(7a)

Ai1 B ni 1 + ni 1,i 2 i1 Ai ni ,i 1 = N i 1 1 Ni 1

1 Bi

(7b)
(8)

5. Verification According to the experimental data, it is a good regression that the proportional constant k equals 0.06. The results show that the difference between the predicted residual fatigue life and the experimental data are acceptable because of the big scatter of fatigue life and most points are within 3 times range as shown in the Fig 4. Experimental fatigue life among composite samples subject to the same fatigue loading are very different and the difference of experimental data is even bigger than 10 times. The predicted residual fatigue life by the proposed algorithm is in good agreement with the experiment, considering the bigger scatter of composites.

Fig 4 The experimental and predicted residual fatigue lives of laminates 6. Conclusion Based on the stiffness degradation rule of composite materials under fatigue loading, a phenomenological fatigue damage model was presented in this paper. The numerical examples show that the fatigue damage model is capable to describe the non linear damage evolution in the whole fatigue life period of material. The characteristics of damage development of composite materials are analyzed and the quantitative relation is gotten, that the parameters of the model are proportional to the fatigue life and inverse proportional to the fatigue loading level. The two-level loading examples show that the model can predict residual fatigue life of composite materials quite well.

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