Composite materials are well-known candidates to contribute to the improvement of structures performance. However, due to its non-homogeneous nature they may introduce abrupt stress/strain transitions which may yield to a premature failure. This situation may be worsened if fibres contrarily to the common cross-section circularity assumption, present non-smooth geometrical contours. Therefore it is pertinent and important to develop multi- scale analyses from mesoscale to multiscale, considering the fibre contour modelling based on microscope images.
From these analyses it is expected to characterize the influence of the irregularities of the fibres on the stresses and strains within the vicinity of the fibres and thus quantifying and explaining how these irregularities may contribute to failure risk.
Isogeometric analysis allows us to define complex contours’ irregularities without a significant increase on the number of degrees of freedom. On this work, we use this method to characterize the fibre contour irregularities and its relation to local states of stresses and strains.
This research project was supported as IPL IDI&CA 2018 project.