Damage development of thermoplastic woven CFRP with spread tow

The composite materials envisioned in this study were fiber-reinforced woven composites, which were composed of fibers as the reinforcement and resin as the matrix. Fiber-reinforced thermoplastic woven composites had high productivity, high toughness, and excellent recyclability because the thermoplastic resin was inexpensive and can be formed in a short period of time. When spread tow were used, it was desirable to reduce void generation and impregnation time during resin impregnation. It was very important to evaluate and understand the mechanical properties and damage mechanisms in advance to ensure the safety and reliability of the structure. However, the woven structure of fiber bundles was complex, and various damage forms such as resin cracks in the matrix, cracks in the fiber bundle, and fiber breakage occur, making damage evaluation difficult. In this study, to investigate the damage evolution behavior of thermoplastic woven CFRP with spread tows, an analysis with the mesh superposition method was proposed and the numerical results were compared with the conventional method. As a result, we believed that the mesh superposition method was useful because the effort required for model creation can be reduced in models with thinner layer thicknesses in the mesh superposition analysis compared to the conventional analysis.