Micro damage and cracking in fibre reinforced composites by a novel hybrid numerical technique

The prediction of failure mechanisms in fibre-reinforced composite materials is of great importance for the design of composite engineering applications. With the aim of providing a tool able to predict and explain the initiation and propagation of damage in unidirectional fiber reinforced composites, in this contribution we develop a micromechanical numerical model based on a novel hybrid approach coupling the virtual element method (VEM) and the boundary element method (BEM). The BEM is a popular numerical technique, efficient and accurate, which has been successfully applied to interfacial fracture mechanics problems of fibre-reinforced composite materials. The VEM has recently emerged as a powerful and robust technique, capable of dealing with very general polygonal/polyhedral meshes, including very distorted mesh elements, and just very recently it has also been applied to fracture and damage problems. In the present model, the BEM is used to model the fiber inclusions, which are not supposed to develop non-linear deformations or damage/crack in their interior, while the VEM, which generalizes the features of FEM, is used to model the surrounding matrix material, which can develop more complex behaviors. The implemented technique has been applied to a simple fracture problem and some promising preliminary results are shown and discussed.