A layered solid finite element formulation with interlaminar enhanced displacements for the modeling of laminated composite structures

Abstract Accurate modeling of layered composite structures often requires the use of detailed finite element models which can sufficiently resolve the kinematics and material behavior within each layer of the composite. However, individually discretizing each material layer into finite elements presents a prohibitive computational expensive given the large number of thin layers comprising some laminated composites. To address these challenges, an 8‐node layered solid hexahedral finite element is formulated with the aim of striking an appropriate balance between efficiency and fidelity. The element is discretized into an arbitrary number of distinct material layers, and employs reduced in‐plane integration within each layer. The chosen reduced integration scheme is supplemented by a novel physical stabilization approach which includes layerwise enhancements to mitigate various forms of locking phenomena. The proposed framework additionally supports the inclusion of interlaminar enhanced displacements to better represent the kinematics of general layered composite materials. The described element formulation has been implemented in the ParaDyn finite element code, and its efficacy for modeling laminated composite structures is demonstrated on a variety of verification problems.