A phase field formulation for modeling intralaminar damage onset and propagation in composites including residual stresses

Bushpalli, SindhuLópez Romano, BernardoGraciani Díaz, Enrique2025-11-042025-11-042025Bushpalli, S., López Romano, B. y Graciani Díaz, E. (2025). A phase field formulation for modeling intralaminar damage onset and propagation in composites including residual stresses. International Journal of Fracture, 249 (4), 69.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10704-025-00877-9.0376-94291573-2673https://hdl.handle.net/11441/178569This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Unfolding failure is a sudden delamination occurring in highly curved fiber-reinforced polymer composite laminates when they are subjected to opening bending moments. Depending on the stacking sequences involved, unfolding failure includes intralaminar damage, interlaminar damage and their complex interactions. The use of these laminates in primary structural components of commercial aircrafts has intensified interest in understanding this failure mechanism. To tackle this, a simple phase field formulation to model the onset and propagation of transverse damage in highly curved laminates is presented. Firstly, the Abaqus implementation of the phase field to model intralaminar damage in composite laminates is established, exploiting the analogy between phase field and the heat transfer model to use Abaqus temperature as the phase field damage parameter. In addition, since residual stresses developed during manufacturing processes affect damage propagation, they are incorporated into the formulation as constant residual strains. Secondly, the proposed implementation is validated by performing tests on benchmark problems. Finally, a preliminary analysis of the unfolding failure test is provided to highlight the importance of including residual stresses in the transverse damage evolution.application/pdf20 p.engAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Fracture mechanicsPhase fieldNumerical analysisTransverse crackingA phase field formulation for modeling intralaminar damage onset and propagation in composites including residual stressesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccesshttps://doi.org/10.1007/s10704-025-00877-9