Fast fatigue life prediction of short fiber reinforced composites using a new hybrid damage approach: Application to SMC

Industrial design of Short Fiber Reinforced Composites (SFRC) structures is subject to several compounding and processing steps of optimization. Moreover, these structures are often submitted to fatigue loading. Therefore, SN curves have to be established for each new composite formulation and for several type of microstructure involved in the real component due to processing. While these preliminary characterizations are time and money consuming, this paper propose a new hybrid methodology for fast fatigue life prediction. Moreover, both monotonic and fatigue behavior of SMC composites is essentially determined by local damage propagation. Therefore, the key idea of the proposed approach is to use a Mori and Tanaka based micromechanical model in order to establish an equation of state relating local damage rate to macroscopic residual stiffness rate. The generalization of this relation to fatigue damage multi-scale description leads to the SN curve fast determination of each considered microstructure. Very limited experimental characterization is required in such a way that SN curve could be established in just one day. Comparison between experimental and simulated Whöler curves highlights a very good agreement for several microstructure configurations in the case of a SMC composite material.