EFFECTS OF ELEMENT TYPES FOR CRACK TIPS IN WOVEN DCB MADE OF GLASS FIBRE-EPOXY RESIN

Abstract

Nowadays, textile and woven fabric composites are taken into consideration forapplications in high mechanical properties and every in-plane direction. However, developments inmodelling and characterisation of the fabric reinforced composite materials are considered more inthe effects of element types used in the mesh generation of the crack tip. The type of elementselected for the crack tip, a critical point for evaluation of crack growth in a double cantileverbeam (DCB) sample, is extremely important. In this study, results of strain energy release rate(SERR) meshed with singular and or brick elements with the experimental data were compared toselect better element type. The plotted results of the crack tips meshed with the brick elements andthe diagrams revealing the SERR in contrast to the crack length was evaluated. In addition, theaforementioned operation has been repeated for singular elements. The theory of the failuremechanics has been used to calculate the amounts of SERR for several crack lengths. It isconcluded that, numerical results from SERR of the crack tip when meshed with singular elementswere closer to the experimental results compared with data of SERR when meshed with brickelements.