Materials used in automotive components play a key role in providing crash safety to passengers and pedestrians. DuPont's lightweight hybrid material technology, which combines injection molded fiber reinforced plastics with drape molded woven composite materials, provides safety engineers with stiff energy absorbing alternatives. In an effort to validate the hybrid material's crash performance while avoiding expensive crash testing, numerical tools and methodologies are applied in evaluation of a hybrid composite test beam.
Multi-scale material models capturing nonlinear strain-rate dependency, anisotropic characteristics, and failure criteria are calibrated on a fiber reinforced plastic and a woven fabric. The fiber orientation and warp/weft angles were extracted from injection and drape molding simulation.
The material laws and orientation information are coupled in a single finite element analysis to predict the performance of the hybrid composite beam under a dynamic three point bending load. Stiffness and strength comparisons between numerical and test results are carried out to validate the finite element modeling methodology and tools used.