Modeling of Punctual Joints for Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics (CFRP) with *MAT_054

The increasing amount of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) components used in the automotive industry opens new questions concerning the numerical modeling of different joining techniques for such materials. Design engineers already know that the beneficial properties of carbon fibers can be best used when considering the necessary joining techniques from the very first step in the preliminary design of a CFRP part. The anisotropical behavior of composites has to be fully considered in numerical simulations as well, especially when failure and partial damage occurs. Using experimental data from bearing tests loaded in different directions, different modeling techniques for structural joints are tested. The achieved correlation between simulation and experimental results will be discussed for a discretization relevant for industrial applications in a vehicle crash environment. Besides a qualitative and quantitative evaluation, the proposed modeling techniques are evaluated in terms of an appropriate representation of failure compared to the failure patterns observed during the experiments.