| Textile composites are widely used in the automotive, aircraft and marine industries due to their light weight, corrosion resistance and high strength and stiffness. A potentially useful development in composites is co-mingling fibers, made from thermoplastic resins with conventional reinforcement fibers and then fabricating textile structure from these co-mingled yarns. Press forming of continuous fiber reinforced co-mingled glass/thermoplastic textiles, offers promising innovations for the automotive industry. With the use of thermoplastic polymers and several improved mechanical and physical properties there is a potential to produce relatively low-cost/high-volume structural composite automotive parts.; This thesis investigates the potential of modeling the stamping process using the finite element method. Several models were built to investigate the fabric draw-in as the part is being stamped. Subsequently, the robustness of LS-DYNA is shown through the capability of doing contact analysis and to capture temperature-dependent material behavior. Lastly, a model that considers the deformation-dependent response of the fabric was integrated into the commercial finite element program LS-DYNA as a User-Supplied Material Model via a FORTRAN subroutine. The finite element results are compared to the experimental stampings and the correlation of the two are discussed. |
