A multiscale analysis of instability-induced failure mechanisms in fiber-reinforced composite structures via alternative modeling approaches

Abstract Multiscale techniques have been widely shown to potentially overcome the limitation of homogenization schemes in representing the microscopic failure mechanisms in heterogeneous media as well as their influence on their structural response at the macroscopic level. Such techniques allow the use of fully detailed models to be avoided, thus resulting in a notable decrease in the overall computational cost at fixed numerical accuracy compared to the so-called direct numerical simulations. In the present work, two different multiscale modeling approaches are presented for the analysis of microstructural instability-induced failure in locally periodic fiber-reinforced composite materials subjected to general loading conditions involving large deformations. The first approach, which is of a semi-concurrent kind, consists in the “on-the-fly” derivation of the macroscopic constitutive response of the composite structure together with its microscopic stability properties through a two-way computational homogenization scheme. The latter one is a novel hybrid hierarchical/concurrent multiscale approach relying on a two-level domain decomposition scheme used in conjunction with a nonlinear homogenization scheme performed at the preprocessing stage. Both multiscale approaches have been suitably validated through comparisons with reference direct numerical simulations, by which the ability of the latter approach in capturing boundary layer effects has been demonstrated.