DISCONTINUITIES IN ALIGNED DISCONTINUOUS FIBERS COMPOSITES: MICROSTRUCTURE ORIENTATION EFFECT ON LOCAL STRESS CONCENTRATION FACTORS

The complexity of the microstructure in composites has led to major generalizations when predicting the strength of composites. In recent years composite strength predictions have progressed by improving the fidelity of randomly packed unidirectional models. Taking it one step, further we created digital twin models of real microstructures for discontinuous aligned composites. In these models we evaluated the impact of the mean fiber direction on the local stress concentration factors. We found that the local stress concentration factors can vary 71% within a 20 ° range of rotation. Nonetheless, this variation is load dependent and will be reduced with load progression.