Lateral Crashing of Tri-Axially Braided Composite Tubes

The paper presents the research that is devoted to analyzing the lateral crash of triaxial braided composite tubes. An existing unit-cell based material model for axial crushing of tubes is modified to model the response of the tri-axially braided composites under lateral loads. Matrix, fiber-tension and fiber-compression failures have been considered to account for lateral crash. "DyCrush", an user-defined material module which can be interfaced with ABAQUS/Explicit, is used to simulate the present conditions. A four-point bending problem is simulated using the "DyCrush" module in the quasi-static case and the results are compared with experimental results. The effect of load rate on the lateral crash response is presented by comparing the load-displacement curves for different dynamic loadings. An active sensing scheme is employed in the experiment to verify the progressive damage development in the structure.