Modeling Damage in Composite Materials Using an Enrichment Based Multiscale Method

: Fielded and future military systems are increasingly incorporating composite materials into their design. Many of these systems subject the composites to physical trauma or environmental conditions that can cause microdamage leading to variations of the mechanical properties on the global scale. For these applications, it is critical to develop the ability to accurately model the response of composite materials, to enable engineers to predict the reaction of the system. To address this problem, a structural based enrichment approach is proposed, that allows macroscale computations to be performed with the microstructural features explicitly considered. This strategy has an advantage in that the enriched local function space may be easily varied from one element to the other allowing variances in the microstructure, such as localized damage to the fibers.