Micro-Scale Modeling of Carbon-Fiber Reinforced Thermoplastic Materials

Thin-walled textile-reinforced composite parts possess excellent properties, including lightweight, high specific strength, internal torque and moment resistance which offer opportunities for applications in mass transit and ground transportation. In particular, the composite material is widely used in aerospace and aircraft structure. In order to estimate accurately the parameters of the constitutive law of woven fabric composite, it is recommended to canvass multi-scale modeling approaches: meso, micro and macro. In the present investigation, based on the experimental results established by carrying out observations by Scanning electron microscope (SEM), we developed a micro-scale FEM model of carbon-fiber reinforced thermoplastic using a commercial software ABAQUS. From the SEM cartography, one identified two types of representative volume elementary (RVE): periodic and random distribution of micro-fibers in the yarn. Referring to homogenization method and by applying the limits conditions to the RVE, we have extracted the coefficients of the rigidity matrix of the studied composites. In the last part of this work, we compare the results obtained by random and periodic RVE model of carbon/PPS and we compute the relative error assuming that random model gives the right value.