Fiber Reinforced Plastic Durability: Nonlinear Multi-Scale Modeling for Structural Part Life Predictions 2019-26-0278

OEMs are seeking to develop vehicle light weighting strategies that will allow them to meet weight and fuel economy targets hence increasingly shifting their focus towards incorporating lighter material solutions at mass produced scales. Composites are seen by automotive manufacturers as the solution to lightweight vehicles without affecting their performance. More and more parts are made of short fiber reinforced plastics (SFRP) as well as continuous fiber composites.

However, replacing metals by composites requires a new design approach and a clear understanding of the composite behavior. This paradigm however requires a dedicated tool for composite design in order to take into account the specific composite behavior. Traditional design tools are not able to state accurately the composite material behavior and sometime leading to use high safety of factors and lack of confidence in the design.

The basic challenge is to understand the influence of the various parameters on properties of composite materials, the material response is sensitive to local fiber orientations, nonlinearity, temperature as well as strain rate dependencies. Traditionally fiber reinforced components are analyzed by considering the homogeneous plastic material and considering equivalent properties obtained from standard tensile strength test on a fiber reinforced specimen, But the anisotropic properties due to random fiber orientation developed due to plastic injection molding does not get captured in traditional approach. Present study aims at capturing the realistic anisotropic properties due to complex fiber orientation developed in injection molding process. The fiber orientation output of mold flow simulation is mapped in the structural analysis solver using DIGIMAT mapping tool. This process involves generating a discrete material data card by combining basic nonlinear material data for unidirectional fiber reinforced plastic and fiber orientation data from each element. This integrated simulation approach involving modeling of anisotropic properties of fiber reinforced pedal helps in accurate stress and deformation prediction and enabling weight reduction by optimizing the performance.