Fatigue Life Simulation on Fiber Reinforced Composites Overview and Methods of Analysis for the Automotive Industry

The need of weight reduction for fuel reduction and CO2 regulations enforces the use of light-weight materials for structural parts also. The importance of reinforced composites will grow in this area. While the structural behavior and the simulation up to high strain-rate processes for those materials has been in the focus of investigation for many years, nowadays the simulation of high cycle fatigue behavior is getting important as well. Efficient fatigue analysis for metals was developed by understanding the microscopic behavior (crack nucleation and initiation) and bringing it to the macroscopic level by combining it with the matching test data (SN curves etc.). Similar approaches can be applied to composite materials as well. The paper gives a comprehensive review of fatigue simulation of fiber reinforced composite, based on the authors' experience in this field for different types of composites like random fiber reinforced to textile reinforcements, from detailed micro-structure analysis to efficient multi-scale algorithms, and from structural applications to detailed fatigue analysis.