Simulation of composite Puck damage in 3d continuum element in Abaqus (UMAT-USDFLD-VUMAT)

Simulation of composite Puck damage in 3d continuum element in Abaqus (UMAT-VUMAT-USDFLD)

This training package focuses on the Puck failure/puck damage criterion in a simple 3d element example using helpful subroutines in Abaqus.

Introduction to Puck failure criterion

An interactive stress-based criterion for failure, Puck’s failure criterion (Puck and Schürmann 1998; Puck, Kopp, et al. 2001; Puck and Schürmann 2001) is appropriate for UD (unidirectional) composite lamina (plies). Puck damage is a kind of composite failure criterion that have some advantages and disadvantages.
The failure is brought on by normal and shear forces acting on the fracture plane at an angle to the material plane, according to the Mohr-Coulomb assumption that forms the basis of the Puck criterion. The Puck theory may anticipate two types of failure: fiber failure and inter-fiber failure. Puck’s description of the inter-fiber failure is essentially matrix cracking.

The inter-fiber failure criterion is based on the presumption that only stresses acting on the fracture plane can cause a fracture (Puck damage assumptions). The fracture plane can be angled between -90 and +90 degrees with regard to the material plane. By moving the three-dimensional stress tensor from the material coordinate system to the fracture plane using the common tensor transformations, the normal and shear stresses operating on this plane are determined.

Failure degradation

The local characteristics are reduced in accordance with the failure type indicated by the failure criterion when the failure is expected by the failure criteria in a specific position of the composite component. Over the past few years, a wide range of degradation models has been put forth (Craddock 1982; Chang, Scott et al. 1984; Gamble, Pilling et al. 1995). According to Murray (1990), there are three basic categories into which degrading material models can be divided: instantaneous, gradual unloading, and constant stress. In this training package, we use instantaneous degradation.

The Abaqus user subroutine allows the program to be customized for particular applications unavailable through the main Abaqus facilities. You should write a user subroutine if you could not run your analysis by ABAQUS built-in models for materials, loads, properties, elements, etc. for example, if you need to model a user-defined nonlinear stress-strain relation, which is not provided by Abaqus, then look for UMAT user subroutine. A more simple subroutine is USDFLD, which allows the creation of user-defined parameters. If it is your first time writing a subroutine like UMAT, VUMAT or USDFLD please read the Start Writing an Abaqus Subroutine: Basics & Recommendations article. After reading this post and watching this tutorial’s demo video, you will definitely decide to save time in Abaqus modelling and get this training package. If you have questions, ask here on our live chat on the left.

It would be useful to see Abaqus Documentation to understand how it would be hard to start an Abaqus simulation without any Abaqus tutorial. If you are working on Abaqus composite damage and need resources about composite FEM simulation, click on the Abaqus composite analysis page to get more than 20 hours of video training packages of composite materials simulation.