Experimental and numerical investigation of the deformation behaviour of cables and thin beam-like structures under multi-axial loading

Abstract

In various applications, it is common to use thin beam-like structures, made of plastic or fibre-reinforced materials, as well as components such as cables. They are flexible, and the most common form of deformation is bending, but they can also be stretched or torqued. Due to their structural composition, a coupling between the different loading directions exists. This is especially pronounced for cables, where the different components interact with each other and the kinematics of each component are different. Thus, to characterise these materials, it is necessary to consider tension, torsion, bending, and a coupling of the three load cases. In this work, such characterisations are performed for a polyvinyl chloride rod, a carbon fibre-reinforced rod, and a coaxial cable. The three materials represent the isotropic and anisotropic material classes and include homogeneous and non-homogeneous cross-sections. An anisotropic elasto-plastic material model is implemented in the finite element method to model the behaviour of such structures. The material model includes anisotropic plasticity so that the structural effects can also be modelled for large deformations. Thin structures are discretised with higher-order elements, and a comparison of the experimental and the simulation results is presented.