Micromechanical Progressive Failure Analysis of Fiber-Reinforced Composite Using Refined Beam Models

An efficient and novel micromechanical computational platform for progressive failure analysis of fiber reinforced composites is presented. The numerical framework is based on a class of refined beam models called Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF), a generalized hierarchical formulation which yields a refined structural theory via variable kinematic description. The crack band theory is implemented in the framework to capture the damage propagation within the constituents of composite materials. A representative volume element (RVE) containing randomly distributed fibers is modeled using the Component-Wise approach (CW), an extension of CUF beam model based on Lagrange type polynomials. The efficiency of the proposed numerical framework is achieved through the ability of the CUF models to provide accurate three-dimensional displacement and stress fields at a reduced computational cost.