Structural failure criterion for spatially-reinforced carbon-carbon composite materials

This paper defines the structural strength criterion for 4DL-reinforced carbon-carbon materials. For this scheme, fiber reinforcement consists of four groups of reinforcing elements, three of them are located in parallel planes with the angles of 120° between them and the fourth one is normal to them. The paper addresses the first failure of the material corresponding to its yield stress, in this point, one of the material components deviates from linear elastic behavior. A composite material is considered to be non-uniform structurally and consists of a matrix and reinforcing elements, rods. Those rods, in their turn, represent a unidirectional composite. To analyze the stress-strain state of individual components of the material, a three-level elastic model is built that uses the analytic approach at the micro level, while at higher levels it uses the finite element method. For numerical calculations, a structural cell of the material is taken. The boundary conditions provide small to negligible influence of the edge effects, thus simulating the behavior of the infinite volume of the material. For the material components, local strength criteria are introduced, where the fields of the criterion quantities are averaged over the volume of the structural cell. The strength surface of the material that corresponds to its first failure is obtained, and the conclusion is made that the suggested criterion provides a reasonable agreement with the available data on the typical carbon-carbon composite characteristics. Based on the calculated dependencies of the material’s yield stress on the load direction, a procedure is suggested to identify the model parameters based on the material failure behavior analysis using standard tensile and compressive tests. Estimated discrepancies between the results calculated using the suggested criterion and those obtained using the limiting stress criterion for biaxial stress states are given. It is shown that the discrepancy may reach tens of percent and in some cases the material strength increases in comparison with that in the uniaxial stress state. The results are subject to verification tests in order to verify the model for advanced spatially reinforced carbon-carbon composite materials.