Simulations of low-velocity impact on fibre metal lanimate

During the last decades the application of composite materials in various structures has become increasingly popular. Advanced hybrid composites are useful in marine and aerospace engineering. In this contribution, impact response and damage process by a drop-weight instrument on glass reinforced (GLARE) 5 fibre-metal laminates (FMLs) with different impacted energy were presented. After comparing and analyzing the histories of contact force, central displacement, absorbed energy and force-deflection for GLARE 5 (2/1) with impacted energy of 8J, 10J and 15J, respectively. The fact that aluminium layers play an important role in absorbing energy was proved. Moreover, A numerical methodology including user material subroutine VUMAT, Johnson–Cook flow stress model is employed to simulate the response of the contact force, deflection, absorbed energy and corresponding failure modes in low-velocity impact of FML. After comparing the five simulation results with different mesh density, the influence of mesh density on simulation results was investigated and presented. The optimalizing mesh size which considered both computational efficiency and accuracy was found.