Extraction of Material Properties using Voxel Meshing and Abaqus

This method creates an Abaqus input file by producing a mesh of regularly shaped hexahedral voxel elements for a textile produced by TexGen. Periodic boundary condition equations are generated based on the paper "Unit cells for micromechanical analyses of particle-refined composites", Shuguang Li, Anchana Wongsto, Mechanics of Materials 36(2004) 543-572. After the Abaqus simulation has been run the material properties are extracted by running a script, provided in the TexGen download, which interrogates the Abaqus .odb file. The procedure is described in the following sections.

Create Textile

• Create a textile either via the GUI or by running a script.
• Assign properties to the matrix and yarns using either

Modeller -> Assign Matrix Properties... and Modeller -> Assign Yarn Properties... options

or

From a script using the CTextile SetMatrixYoungsModulus(), SetMatrixPoissonsRatio() and SetMatrixAlpha() functions and the CYarn SetYoungsModulusX(), SetYoungsModulusY(), SetYoungsModulusZ(), SetShearModulusXY(), SetShearModulusXZ(), SetShearModulusYZ(), SetPoissonsRatioX(), SetPoissonsRatioY(), SetPoissonsRatioZ, SetAlphaX(), SetAlphaY() and SetAlphaZ() functions.

• Ensure that the textile has a domain specified. If created using one of the wizards then a default domain will have been assigned. Otherwise create an appropriate domain the size of the textile unit cell as described in the domain user guide

Create Abaqus Voxel File

• ABAQUS Voxel File

Select File -> Export -> ABAQUS File -> ABAQUS Voxel File

The Abaqus Voxel Options dialog will be displayed

Select the number of voxels required in x,y and z directions

Select whether to output yarns, matrix or both

Periodic Boundary Conditions

All Tied: Assumes a material continuum where the RVE is considered to be infinitely small compared to the size of the engineering part.

Z untied: Gives a 2.5D simulation, assuming a one layer RVE solving in the x and y directions

Periodic boundary condition equations are generated based on the paper "Unit cells for micromechanical analyses of particle-refined composites", Shuguang Li, Anchana Wongsto, Mechanics of Materials 36(2004) 543-572