Development and application of a numerical procedure for the simulation of the “Fibre Bridging” phenomenon in composite structures

In this paper, a novel numerical procedure for delamination growth simulation able to evaluate the Fibre Bridging effect has been used to numerically investigate the mechanical behaviour of stiffened composite panels. The proposed methodology, implemented in ANSYS® FEM code by Ansys Parametric Design Language (APDL), allows to take into account the real variation of the Critical Energy Release Rate associated to the Fibre Bridging phenomenon. A first numerical application has been performed for preliminary validation purposes, simulating the flexural behaviour of representative section of a stiffened composite plate. The considerable agreement between the obtained numerical results and the literature experimental data confirms the effectiveness and the accuracy of the proposed model. Finally, a parametric analysis has been carried out in order to study the influence of the geometrical parameters of single stiffened composite panels in terms of skin-stringer debonding including Fibre Bridging.