Case Study: ISEMP achieves detailed CFRP residual stress simulation with Hexagon Digimat-FE

Integrative Simulation and Engineering of Materials and Processes - Customer Case Study

The customer, Integrative Simulation and Engineering of Materials and Processes (ISEMP), aimed to simulate the curing process of carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) at the microscale to understand how residual stresses lead to micro-damage. Their challenge was to create a realistic simulation of a composite material's microstructure to predict these failure-inducing stresses. To address this, they used the vendor Hexagon's Digimat-FE software.

Hexagon's solution involved using Digimat-FE to generate a realistic representative volume element (RVE) of the material with stochastically distributed fibers for use in FE simulations. This enabled an in-depth analysis which revealed that the highest residual stresses occurred at the fiber-matrix interface and in matrix areas between closely spaced fibers, pinpointing the precise origins of potential micro-defects like delamination and cracking.

Integrative Simulation and Engineering of Materials and Processes

Vasily Ploshikhin

Endowed Chair