https://popups.uliege.be/esaform21/index.php?id=4476 Index terms fr 0 https://popups.uliege.be/esaform21/index.php?id=496 During the forming stage in the RTM process, deformations and orientations of yarns at the mesoscopic scale are essential to evaluate mechanical behaviors of final composite products and calculate the permeability of the reinforcement. However, due to the high computational cost, it is very difficult to carry out a mesoscopic draping simulation for the entire reinforcement. In this paper, a macro-meso scale simulation of composite reinforcements is presented in order to predict mesoscopic deformations of the fabric in a reasonable calculation time. The proposed multi-scale method allows linking the macroscopic simulation of the reinforcement with the mesoscopic modelling of the RVE through a macromeso embedded analysis. On the base of macroscopic simulations using a hyperelastic constitutive law of the reinforcement, an embedded mesoscopic geometry is first deduced from the macroscopic simulation of the draping. To overcome the inconvenience of the macro-meso embedded solution which leads to unreal excessive yarn extensions, local mesoscopic simulations based on the embedded analysis are carried out on a single RVE by defining specific boundary conditions. Finally, the multi-scale forming simulations are investigated in comparison with the experimental results, illustrating the efficiency of the proposed approach, in terms of accuracy and CPU time. Sat, 20 Mar 2021 00:05:47 +0100 Fri, 02 Apr 2021 17:00:02 +0200 https://popups.uliege.be/esaform21/index.php?id=496 https://popups.uliege.be/esaform21/index.php?id=2299 Recent years have seen the development and democratization of continuous fibre composite materials for the manufacture of primary aeronautical structures. Composite materials exhibit excellent specific properties compared to aluminium alloys historically used for these applications. The need in cadence improvement leads the aeronautic industry to consider new processes for primary aeronautical structures manufacturing. Therefore, new dry reinforcements are developed, such as the HiTape® reinforcement designed by Hexcel Reinforcements. HiTape® plies are designed for automated laying in order to build dry stacks that can be formed and infused/injected by a liquid resin afterwards to greatly increase the production rates. To understand and predict results from the forming stage, numerical models are considered as a useful tool. In this work, we propose a new computational approach to model the forming stage of dry HiTape® stacks. The HiTape® ply is a slender structure, exhibiting a transversely isotropic behaviour in large deformations as well as a non-linear bending behaviour. Another particularity is that the bending stiffness of the ply is not directly related its membrane stiffness. When stacks are considered, inter-ply phenomena (opening and sliding) appear and greatly influence the bending stiffness of the structure. To model every of these specificities, diverse techniques are used: solid-shell elements are considered to answer the ply slenderness, embedded elements approach helps to model the membrane/bending behaviours decoupling, frictional cohesive zone model stands for inter-ply phenomena and the particular behaviour of the ply is described using a non-linear physical-invariant based hyperelastic constitutive. The finite element (FE) software Abaqus will be used in this work. Tue, 23 Mar 2021 15:59:16 +0100 Fri, 02 Apr 2021 16:42:23 +0200 https://popups.uliege.be/esaform21/index.php?id=2299