Nonlinear shear behavior and interlaminar shear strength of unidirectional polymer matrix composites: A numerical study

Detailed finite element implementation is presented for a recently developed technique (He et al., 2012) to characterize nonlinear shear stress–strain response and interlaminar shear strength based on short-beam shear test of unidirectional polymeric composites. The material characterization couples iterative three-dimensional finite element modeling for stress calculation with digital image correlation for strain evaluation. Extensive numerical experiments were conducted to examine the dependence of the measured shear behavior on specimen and test configurations. The numerical results demonstrate that consistent results can be achieved for specimens with various span-to-thickness ratios, supporting the accurate material properties for the carbon/epoxy composite under study.