A Hypercube Application in Large Scale Composite Materials Modeling

This large scale application combines several areas of research to develop computational models for simulating the failure mechanisms of composite materials consisting of brittle fibers (such as carbon) embedded in a matrix material (such as epoxy resin). The simulations combine the ideas of structural stress analysis, numerical linear algebra, and visualization techniques to model the behavior of fibrous composites under uniaxial tensile load. This will allow laboratory experiments to be extrapolated more accurately to real applications, providing an enhanced capability to optimize designs of large structures made of composite materials with less extensive and costly experimental programs. Further, system performance and reliability may be improved substantially. In this paper a brief discussion of the theory of composite materials as it relates to the simulations will first be given. Next the procedures used to generate and analyze the structure will be presented. The computational techniques used to perform the simulation will be given as well as results from selected test cases. A summary of results and future directions in this research will be given at the end of the paper.