The application of a reduced volume method for the simulation of the characterisation of a carbon fibre pressure vessel

Abstract : The characteristics of advanced composite materials make them ideally suited for use in pressure vessels for storing gas as fuel for ground transport vehicles. It has been found that the failure process starts with randomly distributed fibre breaks and as the loading continues, they coalesce into clusters of fibre breaks which lead to failure [4]. However, improvements are needed to reduce computational times when performing full-scale simulations. The reduced volume method is therefore applied to the stochastic fibre break model related to the concept of an integral range. This method allows the calculation for a certain volume of a laminate that statistically represents the same physical properties as a full-scale pressure vessel. A convergence study with multiple configurations has been done and shows that the assignment of fibre failure strength values at each integration points is not the same if the related configurations were rotated. The integral method has been successfully applied to the 3D case and by using only 23 elements for 1 simulation, 95% of confidence level can be achieved. Another important remark is that the result from the model is highly sensitive with the Weibull characteristics value that was used to produce the fibre rupture values.