NUMERICAL MODELING OF LOW-CYCLE FATIGUE OF FIBER REINFORCED COMPOSITE

The aim of this paper is to present the adoption of the progressive damage model to describe the degradation of polymer composites under ultra-low-cycle fatigue. The first part of the paper is devoted to the presentation of the approach and discussion of the theoretical aspects of the numerical model. The model contains three states describing the material degradation process: undamaged response, point of damage initiation and damage evolution. The second part is devoted to the implementation of the presented model to describe the fatigue life of the polymer composite under ultra-low cycle fatigue. A polymer composite comprising unidirectional layers was modeled as linear elastic with progressive stiffness degradation. The model was loaded in cyclic tension with a sinusoidal waveform. Numerical modeling has been performed using Abaqus software. The results of the numerical analysis results were compared with the experimental results taken from literature.