A Nano-micro-macro-multiscale Model for Progressive Failure Prediction in Advanced Composites

Abstract

The bottleneck for inserting new and improved polymer matrix composites (PMC) is the overwhelming amount of testing required to incorporate new material into the Design Allowables Database (DAD). The development of the DAD requires evaluation of multiple batches of composites with the associated construction of very large mechanical and other physical properties databases. Also, to quantify uncertainty in the structural performance, (1) numerous subcomponents may have to be fabricated requiring expensive tooling, and (2) one must then perform expensive tests on these elements to determine their long-term performance. In this context, Integrated Computational Materials Science and Engineering (ICMSE) provides a methodology to support materials development without recourse to expensive trial-and-error approach to materials fabrication and characterization. The motivation for this chapter is that design requirements and knockdown factors are limiting our ability to exploit advanced composite and nanostructured composite materials for system-level payoffs. While there has been a large body of research conducted in atomistic simulation of crystalline metallic materials, a large technology gap exists in the multiscale simulation of amorphous polymeric materials and their composites. This chapter is a description of a methodology for fundamentally addressing failure in a polymer composite. The nanoscale is addressed first, to highlight incorporation of damage using both strength- and fracture-based criterions and problems associated when modeling a polymer system, followed by a discussion of microscale modeling which receives information from the nanoscale using homogenized properties. This in turn iteratively interacts with the macroscale to provide global strength estimates of a composite structure.