Fracture and Damage Analysis of Crimped Glass Fibre Truss Type Elements

The paper deals with the damage behaviour of special glass fibre reinforced plastic truss type elements, called Polystal profiles, which are widely used as load bearing cables. To connect these profiles with other structural elements steelmade hulls are crimped onto the profiles. The challenge is to detect the optimal crimping ratio (CR) to realize maximum longitudinal loads in restraint systems. By using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) several damage states like fibre pullout and matrix cracking could be observed. To describe the failure behaviour within the rod during crimping a 3D strain based fracture criterion was developed and implemented within the commercial finte element package Abaqus. The verification of this criterion is done by simulating the crimping process followed by tensile tests. The numerical results are compared with the experiments and with the results obtained by SEM. An outlook on further work to improve the failure prediction is given. (© 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)