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Polymers and Polymer Composites

MODELLING ORTHOTROPIC VISCOELASTIC BEHAVIOUR OF COMPOSITE LAMINATES USING A COINCIDENT ELEMENT METHOD

August 1, 2003 By: Nallainathan L; Liu X L; Chiu W K; Jones R Research article

Title: MODELLING ORTHOTROPIC VISCOELASTIC BEHAVIOUR OF COMPOSITE LAMINATES USING A COINCIDENT ELEMENT METHOD
Page Range: p.669-677
Author(s): Nallainathan L; Liu X L; Chiu W K; Jones R
File size: 145K
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Journal: Polymers and Polymer Composites
Issue Year: ppc
Volume: 11
Issue No: No. 8

Abstract
This paper presents a finite element procedure for modelling the viscoelastic behaviour of orthotropic composites. The procedure uses a commercially available finite element package known as ABAQUS and requires no code development. Consequently, the procedure is claimed to be highly flexible and has the potential to be applied to a wide range of practical problems. ABAQUS is a general-purpose package for structural and non-structural analyses, but the orthotropic behaviour of laminated composites that can be modelled by ABAQUS is restricted to circumstances involving simple elasticity and plasticity, not viscoelasticity. However, it is known that the viscoelasticity in laminated polymer composites is significantly orthotropic, and so to overcome this limitation of the FEA package, a simple procedure is proposed and described, which is referred to as the Coincident Element Method (CEM). In this method, a composite method is modelled by using two shell elements which are superimposed onto each other in such a way that they are coincident, i.e., the two shell elements share the same nodes and deform together. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the capacity and accuracy of the procedure. 9 refs.

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