Progressive damage and failure analysis of fiber-reinforced laminated composites containing a hole

A progressive damage and failure model for fiber reinforced laminated composites is developed in combination of finite element procedure and micromechanical model based on a unit cell. The micromechanical model can be used to evaluate failure criteria at the micro-level with fiber and matrix material properties. Once either of the constituents has damaged, the corresponding material properties are degraded by the damage factor. The micromechanical model and the damage theory are implemented in the finite software ABAQUS by using the user material subroutine UMAT and VUMAT, to model the damage progression and compute the ultimate strength of the composite laminates containing a hole. The predicted strengths for this model is compared with the experimental results, and a well agreement in the simulation and experimental resulted is revealed.