Compressive Failure Analysis of Thin-Walled Thermosetting Composite Structures Accounting for the Preforming Effects

Plain woven carbon-fibre-reinforced-plastics (PW-CFRPs) can be rapidly manufactured as thin-walled vehicular structures by taking advantages of high efficiency of the thermo-compression process and excellent formability of the fabrics. The fabrics generally take place significant shear deformations during the preforming process with the restrictions of blank holding force, which can lead to great effects on structural performances of PW-CFRP structures. Ignoring the preforming effects will result in unreliable designs and increase failure risks of products. Unfortunately, there still lacks effective numerical models to support the process–structure coupling analysis of PW-CFRP structures. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop the high-fidelity numerical model for process–structure coupling analysis of PW-CFRP structures. In this study, a novel draping–compression coupling finite element model (FEM) was developed in ABAQUS/Explicit, which primarily contained draping, mapping and compressing analysis steps, and governed by the corresponding coupling VUMAT subroutine. Results show that the coupling FEM ignoring the influence of the draping-induced shear deformation on the structural performance will result in the inaccurate compressive forces, whilst the FEM considering the preforming effect can predict the load–displacement curves more accurately. The draping–compression coupling FEM developed in this study has been proven effective in the process–structure coupling analysis of PW-CFRP structures. Graphical Abstract