Progressive damage and failure of mechanically fastened joints in CFRP laminates - Part II: Failure prediction of an industrial junction

In part II of this study, a methodology is presented to compute the failure of large-scale bolted joints in composite structures. This methodology is based both on a multilevel calculation strategy and on virtual testing. At the global level, coarse FE modelling of the structure is used to assess the load distribution between the fasteners. The most loaded fasteners are identified and the loads issued from the global calculation are used as boundary conditions for the local failure analysis, based on fast semi-empirical models. Nevertheless, in this work, instead of using experimental data, prevision of failure is achieved by fully numerical means. The parameters of the semi-empirical models are evaluated by virtual testing, using the refined FE model proposed in part I of this paper. (c) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.