A Nonlocal Continuum Approach forProgressive Damage in FRP Materials

In this paper, a progressive damage model for fiber-reinforced composite materials based on work of Yen and Caiazzo [1] is coupled to a nonlocal regularization technique proposed by Cesar de Sa et al. [2] in order to prevent strain localization and strong mesh sensitivity of the solution in presence of material softening. The proposed material model is implemented in commercial explicit finite element code ABAQUS via the Vectorized User MATerial subroutine VUMAT and its effectiveness is assessed through the simulation of progressive damage growth around a notch in a composite laminate under loading condition. It is shown that the implemented numerical strategy is able to decrease the pathological mesh dependency and strain localization phenomenon inherently present in a damage local model.