A micro–meso-model of intra-laminar fracture in fiber-reinforced composites based on a discontinuous Galerkin/cohesive zone method

The recently developed hybrid discontinuous Galerkin/extrinsic cohesive law framework is extended to the study of intra–laminar fracture of composite materials. Toward this end, micro-volumes of different sizes are studied. The method captures the debonding process, which is herein proposed to be assimilated to a damaging process, before the strain softening onset, and the density of dissipated energy resulting from the damage (debonding) remains the same for the different studied cell sizes. Finally, during the strain softening phase a micro-crack initiates and propagates in agreement with experimental observations. We thus extract a resulting mesoscale cohesive law, which is independent on the cell sizes, using literature methods.