Experimental and numerical investigation of drop weight impact of aramid and UHMWPE reinforced epoxy

Abstract

Abstract Due to their characteristics such as weight/strength ratio and absorbed energy, the widespread use of composite materials in the last decades engorged the companies to exploit these materials invariant applications like the aerospace, automobile, and marine hull. However, there are some obstructs to the use of these materials that may constrain that. This came from the fact, that composite materials suffer from different damages modes that occur during loading and can be lead to catastrophic failure in their structure, such as intralaminar and interlaminar damage. Consequently, this motivated the researchers to study its behavior considering different damage modes and at different loading states. This work performed a finite element simulation using the Abaqus program of low-velocity drop impact for epoxy reinforced with Kevlar 49 and Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene (UHMWPE) with different thicknesses and number of layers. A user-defined material VUMAT subroutine-based progressive damage model, and the Hashin failure criteria implemented in Abaqus Explicit finite element code had been utilized in this work. In Addition, the interlaminar damage models depend on the cohesive zone model (CZM). The numerical simulation results were compared with the experiments data to confirm the reliability of the numerical model.