Development of energy efficient and environmentally friendly technologies is certainly at the forefront of Engineering of the twenty-first Century. Design of high-strength, light-weight, and corrosion-resistant materials is the key, for example, for the design of energy-saving transportation systems (cars, aircrafts, ships, etc.). We work on the formulation of general triaxial constitutive laws for the simulation of anisotropic elasticity, damage, and failure of quasi-brittle composites, such as carbon-epoxy and glass-epoxy composites. The adopted model (called the Spectral Stiffness Microplane Model) is formulated in the context of the microplane theory and exploits the spectral decomposition of the stiffness matrix to identify orthogonal strain modes at the microplane level. Future extensions of this work will take into account the visco-elastic, rate- and temperature-dependent character of these materials in order to be able to simulate the behavior of mechanical components under high impulsive loading conditions and in extreme environments.
Experimental specimens.
Experimental results.
Computational model schematic.
Comparison of experimental and computational results.