Damage Analysis of CFRP Laminates under the Soft-Body Impact

The application of composite laminates to fan blade of turbofan engine is demanded in order to reduce the fuel cost and the noise of aircrafts. Bird strike is one of the most important problems in the engineering application of fan blades. However, the soft-body impact damage on the composite laminates under high-velocity impact has not been clarified sufficiently due to their complexity. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the damage process of the composite materials under the soft-body impact. The current work presented the numerical simulation for soft-body impact using the SPH method to address the large deformation problem, and discussed the change of the failure mode of the composite laminates as a function of impact velocity. Especially, in order to simulate the realistic damage process in composite laminates, a novel approach for the separation of particles was introduced to the model. We confirmed that the numerical simulation was applicable in the soft-body impact problem by the agreement of contact pressure with the experimental results. Moreover, it was shown that the catastrophic failure of the composite laminates by the soft-body impact could be also predicted using this numerical simulation.