Finite element simulation for textile composite stamping

Textile fabric reinforced composites have shown great potential as a valuable alternative to metal sheet for providing high-strength and low-weight products. However, the high manufacturing costs and lack of fundamental knowledge and systematical understanding of their potential manufacturing processes have hampered the introduction of woven fabric reinforced composites into high-volume merchandises. Stamping is a potential way to solve these problems. This paper presents a fully continuum mechanics-based approach for stamping simulation of textile fiber reinforced composites by using finite element (FE) method. Conventional shell elements whose material properties equivalently characterize the global mechanical behavior of textile composite sheet during forming are used to model textile composite fabrics in the numerical simulation. A previously developed nonorthogonal constitutive model by the authors is used to represent the anisotropic mechanical behavior of textile composites under large shear deformation during stamping. In this model, a convected coordinate system is embedded in shell elements to capture the fiber yarn reorientation and redistribution during stamping. A balanced plain woven composite is taken as an example for the stamping simulation. A user material subroutine for the balanced textile composite is designed for commercial FE package ABAQUS/Standard. Several types of textile composite stamping including hemispherical and rectangular box are simulated. The main advantage of this approach lies in its simplicity. It is easy to implement, and does not drastically increase the burden of computation. It builds ups a foundation for the processing design of textile composite stamping.