An embedded meshing technique (SET) for analysing local strain distributions in textile composites

A novel meshing approach is presented for analysing composite materials at the micro and meso-mechanical scale. The new approach overcomes the difficulty traditionally faced when analysing composites at different length scales due to the complex geometry. Previous super-positioning meshing techniques such as the embedded element technique (EET) allows for independent meshing of the matrix phase which overcomes difficulties in assigning a 'discrete' mesh to the domain. However, the technique loses accuracy at the host-embedded interface which is an important region to consider in composite analysis. The proposed Semi-conformal Embedded Technique (SET), builds upon the previous state of the art: super-positioning meshing techniques by carefully partitioning the 'host' domain to match the boundary of the embedded domain, thereby, overcoming spurious strains at the boundary of the domains. SET was able to accurately predict the strains at critical regions within an idealised model of a plain weave textile with no resin rich region at the cross-over regions between tows. The SET methodology gave results that were on par with those achieved using a benchmark 'discrete' meshing approach at a fraction of the computational costs.