A NEW DISCONTINUOUS FE MODEL FOR FIBRE-REINFORCED BRITTLE MATERIALS

Fibre-reinforced composites are attractive materials due to their good load bearing capacity under general stress state and to their fracture and fatigue resistance. The use of reinforcing fibres, especially in brittle or quasi brittle materials, allows to obtain better performance with respect to traditional materials. In the present paper, a continuum finite element (FE) formulation to analyse fracture mechanics problems in fibre-reinforced and in plain brittle or quasi-brittle materials involving discontinuity of the displacement field is developed. By employing an energy approach, an appropriate stress field correction in the above FE formulation is used to simulate the displacement discontinuity (crack), whereas the effect of reinforcing fibres is considered through a micromechanical model. Finally, some simple 2D examples are presented in order to evaluate the capability of the proposed computational approach.