A Binary Model For Thermal Expansion Of Fiber Reinforced Composites

Fiber-reinforced composite has been widely used in the aerospace, automobile and shipbuilding, civil construction, sports and leisure, and other fields. Study its performance in high or low temperature environment has been an important research direction of composites。To analysis the thermal expansion behavior of composites, a finite element technique based on binary model was proposed for the corresponding thermal expansion analysis. The tow was divided into rod elements and only its axial deformation and stress were taken into consideration. The matrix and the transverse effects of the tow, considered as an effective medium with equivalent stiffness and thermal deformation, was modeled by 3D continuous finite elements, thermal expansion coefficients of single fiber rod element and effective medium were determined by equivalence principle. Multi-point constraints were introduced to assemble the tow and effective medium elements. Two binary model was proposed with different assumption, one assumption is that effective medium is homogeneous isotropic material, the other assumption is that effective medium is homogeneous orthotropic material.Based on ABAQUS software platform, the binary model was applied to predicting the thermal expansion coefficients of unidirectional fiber reinforced plates and laminated plates. It can be seen that the present results are in agreement with those of theory and 3D finite element analysis, what demonstrates the validity of the present model as well as the method. Furthermore, the influence of the fiber’s volume fraction, ply orientation angle of fiber and the order of ply on the thermal expansion coefficients were studied. The model was utilized in micro-expansion design and structural thermal stress analysis of a curved laminate with holes considered by secondary development of user subroutine on the platform of ABAQUS.The binary model of textile composite was developed for thermal expansion analysis in this thesis. This work contributes to prediction of thermal expansion coefficient of fiber-reinforced composite...