A Hydrothermal Factor Calculating Approach Based on FEM for Fiber-reinforced Composites

The wide range of applications of fiber-reinforced composites in numbers of engineering fields is demanding better understanding on its hydrothermal properties. Especially for those are applied under complex hydrothermal environment such as aircraft industry. However, most methods we used at the present are either complicated or demand high-cost. In this paper, a novel approach based on finite element method (FEM) is proposed to calculate the hydrothermal factor by supposing an original decrease in the laminates stiffness. The integrated strains, consisting of Room Temperature Dry (RTD) strain and FEM simulated strain with the Elevated Temperature Wet (ETW) strain, are used to make an estimate for the hydrothermal factor. Hence, this FEM approach with low cost can be used to calculate the hydrothermal factor without doing full-scale structural ETW experiments. Compared with experimental results of the notched compression and single-bolted joints, it can be concluded that the approach introduced in the present paper can predict excellently the determination scope of the hydrothermal factor reasonably even in structural scale.