Proceedings Paper for the 60th AIAA/ASME/ASCE/AHS/ASC Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Conference at AIAA SciTech 2020 Orlando, Florida, USA 6-10 January 2020 2020

AIAA 2020-1380

Multiscale Modeling of Damage Response in Nanocomposites Reinforced with Carbon Nanotubes

Neslihan Genckal and Gary D. Seidel
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, 24061-0203, USA

This work is a numerical study of nanocomposites reinforced with CNTs. The dynamic fracture behavior of a specimen is investigated to understand the enhancement of strength with nanomaterials. In order to simulate the material behavior properly, a hierarchical multiscale framework is going to be employed. In the hierarchical multiscale framework, the information from all the RVEs elements in the subscales are passed to the next scale up in independent and off-line simulations. In order to retain the computational efficiency when there is a need to incorporate damage initiation and propagation, the hierarchical training of isotropic continuum damage models at the subscales is employed as part of the initialization phase of the multiscale simulation. As a preliminary study to the hierarchical multiscale analysis, material properties are randomly distributed, which is analogous to having different subscale RVE properties in the hierarchical multiscale analysis. The distribution is done by using a Gaussian distribution, which gives statistically meaningful distribution of the material properties. The brittle and continuum damage models are employed for modeling the damage to understand how different damage models affect the fracture behavior in the numerical analyses. The numerical simulations for the dynamic fracture are done by using an explicit peridynamics framework.