Impact of a 3D woven textile composite thin panel: Damage and failure modeling

An orthotropic elastic resultant shell constitutive model is presented. The constitutive model includes a Tsai-Wu failure criterion to indicate the onset of material failure, and an isotropic scalar damage formulation is incorporated to describe the postfailure material reponse. The model has been implemented in the explicit finite-element code DYNA3D. The model, was used to simulate the response of a flat-panel impact test with severe damage. Comparisons with a representative sample from the experimental results, including details of one strain history, are presented. While not addressing the many material complexities of 3D woven textile composites, the resulting engineering tool appears to be useful for assessing the response of thin textile composite structures subjected to damaging impacts.