A micromechanical cyclic damage model for high cycle fatigue failure of short fiber reinforced composites

This paper presents a micromechanical high cycle fatigue damage model for short fiber reinforced composite materials. Because the damage processes within such materials are influenced strongly by their microstructure, we use a mean field homogenization framework to compute the macroscopic behavior of the composite as well as the microscopic stresses and strains in the constituent phases. This allows us to account for damage phenomena related to both the fiber phase as well as in the matrix material. Fiber and fiber-interface damage is modeled using a Tsai-Wu and Weibull-based approach and the progressive damage due to cyclic loading is described by a progressive matrix damage model. The latter includes a novel coupling term in which the matrix damage progression is linked to the damage state of the reinforcing fibers. A cycle-based numerical formulation is used to overcome the computational limits of such load cases in the time domain. While the approaches are in principle applicable to different types of fiber-matrix composite, a short glass fiber reinforced polyamide 6.6 is used as an example material, for which microstructural analyses as well as tensile and fatigue tests are reported. The model's capabilities with regard to complex fiber orientations and different fiber fractions are studied using different grades of this material class. Furthermore, the model is analyzed via benchmarks of the numerical schemes and by parameter sensitivity studies. The results show that the approach is capable of modeling the complex and microstructure-dependent fatigue damage and fatigue limits for the different material grades with limitations only becoming visible at very high fiber fractions.