Failure of chopped carbon fiber Sheet Molding Compound (SMC) composites under uniaxial tensile loading: Computational prediction and experimental analysis

This paper presents a computational framework to predict the tensile failure of chopped carbon fiber SMC composites based on the Representative Volume Element (RVE) model. In the framework, a conforming mesh-based reconstruction algorithm is developed to generate mesostructure RVE models of SMC based on the statistical characteristics. Moreover, constitutive models are proposed for the three phases in SMC composites: fiber chip, matrix, and...