Thermo-mechanical analysis of laminated composites shells exposed to fire

Abstract

This paper describes the research performed within the scope of H2020 project FIBRESHIP in the development and validation of a thermo-mechanical model to assess the fire performance of composite structures. A one-dimensional thermal model with pyrolisis is used to obtain the temperature prole across the thickness and later introduced in the thermomechanical model with a quadrilateral shell element approach. The composite constitutive model employed is the socalled Serial/Parallel Rule of Mixtures (SPROM) which has been modied to introduce the effect of the thermal deformation. A set of experimental tests are then used to validate the correctness of the numerical method proposed. The experimental data used to validate the thermal model is the classic Henderson experimental test. The thermomechanical coupling is validated against an original vertical furnace test of a FRP ships bulkhead following on the 2010 FTP Code standards. These validations demonstrate the correctness and accuracy of the proposed decoupled thermomechanical formulation.

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