A mixed-dimensional CutFEM methodology for the simulation of fibre-reinforced composites

Kerfriden, P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7749-3996, Claus, S. and Mihai, I. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6725-2048 2020. A mixed-dimensional CutFEM methodology for the simulation of fibre-reinforced composites. Advanced Modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences 7 (1) , 18. 10.1186/s40323-020-00154-5

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Abstract

We develop a novel unfitted finite element solver for composite materials with quasi-1D fibrous reinforcements. The method belongs to the class of mixed-dimensional non-conforming finite element solvers. The fibres are treated as 1D structural elements that may intersect the mesh of the embedding structure in an arbitrary manner. No meshing of the unidimensional elements is required. Instead, fibre solution fields are described using the trace of the background mesh. A regularised “cut” finite element formulation is carefully designed to ensure that analyses using such non-conforming finite element descriptions are stable. We also design a dedicated primal/dual operator splitting scheme to resolve the coupling between structure and fibrous reinforcements efficiently. The novel computational strategy is applied to the solution of stiff computational models whereby fibrous reinforcements may lose their bond to the embedding material above a certain level of stress. It is shown that the primal-dual 1D/3D CutFEM scheme is convergent and well-behaved in variety of scenarios involving such highly nonlinear structural computations.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Engineering
Publisher:	SpringerOpen
ISSN:	2213-7467
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	24 September 2020
Date of Acceptance:	28 March 2020
Last Modified:	16 May 2023 20:34
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/135050

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