Numerical interpretation of fully bio-resorbable glass fibre reinforced composites

The improvement of in-situ polymerization (ISP) over laminate stacking (LS) was highlighted in a recent publication and studied in this work via 3D finite element model. It was assumed that the fibre/matrix interface was a cohesive layer and cohesive elements were adopted to model the interface. Elastic stiffness was determined by using an inverse method based on the experimental data. In addition to the interface, the effects of void ratio and misalignment were investigated and these influences were quantitatively integrated into the interfacial stiffness. Comparisons against experimental results revealed that the numerical model was capable of modelling the difference in the interface of the composites produced by the different manufacturing methods, e.g. the numerical prediction of the stiffness of the composites with 35% fibre volume fraction was ∼8.5GPa while the experimental data was ∼9GPa. When the fibre volume fraction was 50%, the numerical prediction was ∼20GPa compared with ∼18GPa from experimental data. Moreover, the potential of the numerical model to detect failure is also discussed.