Calibration of the material parameters of a CFRP laminate for numerical simulations

The aim of present paper is to show a procedure to calibrate mechanical properties to be used in a finite element model for a carbon fibre-reinforced plastic laminate that use solid elements. A reduced experimental programme including tensile test, tensile test on specimen with a central hole, three-point bending test and three-point bending test on short beam test were carried out. Every test was numerically reproduced by means of an explicit solver. Properties are determined from the tensile test and unmodified for the other load scenarios which are used as validation benchmarks. Finally, it is demonstrated that the properties determined with the simple tensile tests can guarantee accurate results when adopted to simulate much more complicated stress patterns.