Although high-fidelity modeling of progressive damage has advanced our understanding of failure mechanisms in fibre-reinforced composites, such techniques are currently still too computationally intensive for direct application to composite structures. The multi-scale nature of damage in composites suggests that pertinent mechanisms could be interrogated at the appropriate length scale, where only active damage mechanisms and sites are explicitly modeled at the lower scale while inactive sites are represented by homogenized regions at the higher scale. In principle, this multi-fidelity and multi-scale approach may bridge mechanisms from micro- (fibre) to meso- (ply and tow) to macro- (structure) levels with potentially improved computational efficiency. This talk presents some recent developments of concurrent adaptive modeling strategies applied to progressive damage in composites. An adaptive discrete-smeared crack (ADiSC) method that combines the advantages of a discrete crack method (DCM) (high fidelity and explicit) and smeared crack method (SCM) (diffused damage and efficient) in a single model is described. This approach has been incorporated in an adaptive multi-fidelity (AMF) strategy, where shell elements are locally transitioned to brick elements (and vice versa), driven by the need for enhanced (or reduced) fidelity. Damage simulation with a concurrent micro-macro approach called the Direct FE² (“finite element squared”) is under development; here the macroscale FE does not require homogenized constitutive properties because the required information is concurrently extracted from damage at the microscale FE level. The talk concludes with discussion of future possibilities and applications of multi-scale and multi-fidelity modelling of composites.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Tong-Earn (TE) Tay (2022), "Adaptive Multi-Scale & Multi-Fidelity Progressive Failure Analysis of Composites," https://cdmhub.org/resources/2038.

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1. Global Composites Experts Webinar
2. Multiscale Modeling
3. Progressive Failure Analysis