A pragmatic orthotropic elasticity-based damage model with spatially distributed properties applied to short glass-fibre reinforced polymers

Abstract

This article presents a simple progressive damage model for quasi-brittle materials, combining orthotropic elasticity with a scalar damage model including spatial variation of the damage initiation strain and the crack band method for softening regularization. The model’s performance is first analyzed from a numerical point of view and then demonstrated for tensile tests (, and ), open-hole tensile tests () and three-point bending ( and ) tests of short fibre-reinforced polypropylene with 15 wt.% and 30 wt.% glass fibres. Despite its simplicity, the model captures the anisotropic elastic and inelastic behaviour observed in experiments. The model is applicable for orthotropic brittle or quasi-brittle materials, where the variability in elastic properties is negligible and the orientation dependency of the fracture strain is small or not relevant for the application.