Integrated Process-Property Simulation of Compression-Molded Discontinuous Long Fiber Composites (CM-DLFC)

This work was sponsored by DARPA-DSO under the Tailorable Feedstock for Forming (TFF) program and was performed by Dr. Nilakantan while he worked at Teledyne Scientific & Imaging. Dr. Nilakantan invented a method to generate realistic virtual microstructures of compression-molded discontinuous long fiber composites that explicitly captured the fiber centerline waviness induced by compression molding, which commercial preprocessors were at the time incapable of capturing. The method involved running a series of LS-DYNA simulations wherein each prepreg chip was explicitly modeled using the Binary Model approach, i.e. 1D tows embedded in a 3D matrix. Virtual test specimens were then used to predict the mechanical behavior.

Relevant Other Publications

• Integrated Process-Property Simulation Framework for Compression Molded Discontinuous Long Fiber Composites using DYNAMold® and LS-DYNA®, FEA Information Engineering Solutions, Volume 7, Issue 9, September 2018 (URL)