Predicting Mechanical Behaviour of Reinforced Plastic and Composite Parts

All the main industries worldwide are progressively adopting the usage of reinforced plastic and composite material for their product and have to face one major difficulty when it comes to design them: predicting the mechanical behavior of multi-phases and heterogeneous materials. On the structural side, each of these materials show a specific heterogeneous and anisotropic behavior in terms of stiffness, failure or electrical behavior as well as strain rate or thermal dependency fully driven by the microstructural organization of the reinforcements in the matrix. On the other side, the manufacturing process drives the final fibers orientation and distribution throughout the part. This means the design teams need a material and structural engineering technology able to create the link between the manufacturing process and the structural behavior of the components. Such technology is based on a micromechanical material modeling strategy based on the combination of the constituents’ behaviors and the local microstructure definition. This extended abstract address briefly how this technology can be used to obtain accurate prediction of reinforced plastic and composite parts for any performance. A brief example is shown here. Other application examples will be shown during the presentation.