Modeling of Crush Behavior of Carbon Fiber Composites

Abstract

The use of continuous carbon fiber composites in load bearing automotive applications can potentially offer significant benefits in weight reduction provided that the key issues regarding the prediction of energy absorption and crash energy management are thoroughly addressed. In this paper, the development of a framework to address the challenges in modeling the crush of non-crimp carbon fiber composites (NCF) is presented. Material models for intra and inter-laminar damage mechanisms were first developed and validated with tensile, bending, and impact experiments. Furthermore, these models were extended to dynamic axial crush of flat specimens and the predicted results were correlated with the experimental results for samples with and without delamination suppression. Good correlations were observed for the crush load and crush morphology, allowing one to unambiguously assess the accuracy of the developed models.