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 have 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.
