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Predicting fatigue lifetimes of short fibre reinforced parts

Short fibre reinforced thermoplastic parts that are subjected to mechanical and cyclical loading for a long period of time eventually fail.

To prevent premature failure in service, predictability is key when designing load bearing components. The lifetime depends on the nature of the thermoplastic material, but also on the amount of reinforcement, the type of reinforcement and the setup of the manufacturing process. All these ingredients make the fatigue modelling of short fibre reinforced plastic parts highly challenging.

Dedicated solutions at several stages of the modelling workflow are thus required. The ingredients needed are (a) an accurate material model for any orientation tensor and any loading type & direction, (b) a procedure allowing us to identify model parameters from a reduced set of experimental data, (c) an efficient structural and fatigue solver enabling the prediction of lifetimes for various types of loading conditions (constant amplitude, random signal, frequency/time domain loadings, etc.) and (d) an overall methodology able to account for stress gradients to deliver accurate predictions for any part geometry and mesh.

In this webinar, we will present a solution that allows you to accurately predict the fatigue lifetimes of short fibre reinforced parts for a variable amplitude loading. The framework combines engineering tools that enable design engineers to predict fatigue lifetimes of engineering plastics applications that account for material anisotropy and nonlinear behaviour. The webinar highlights the key features of the framework and demonstrates its ability to predict the response of a representative demonstration part.