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Published January 2021 | public
Journal Article

A Multiscale cohesive law for carbon fiber networks

Abstract

Better predictive models of mechanical failure in low-weight heat shield composites would aid material certification for missions with aggressive atmospheric entry conditions. Here, we develop such a model for the rapid engineering analysis of the failure limits of phenolic impregnated carbon ablator (PICA) - a leading heat shield material whose structural component is a carbon fiber network. We hypothesize inelastic deformation failure mechanisms and model their behavior using molecular dynamics simulations to calculate the binding energy. We then upscale this binding energy to the macroscale using a renormalization argument. The approach delivers insightful and reasonably accurate macroscale predictions that compare favorably to experiments. In application, the model is validated for a particular variety of PICA by comparison to experiment and would then be used to study design scenarios in different entry conditions.

Additional Information

© 2020 Elsevier. Received 8 June 2020, Revised 5 August 2020, Accepted 2 September 2020, Available online 16 September 2020. JBH and LJA gratefully acknowledge support through the NASA Entry Systems Modeling (ESM) project. WJS gratefully acknowledges support through the NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship. The bulk of the work contained herein was completed while WJS completed graduate studies at Caltech and has since moved to LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLNL-JRNL-808494). We would like to thank J. Monk for interesting discussions and for providing phenolic atomistic configurations. Resources supporting this work were provided by the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center. CRediT authorship contribution statement: W. Schill: Investigation, Writing - original draft, The authors all contributed all aspects of the design, investigation, and writing of the study. L.J. Abbott: Investigation, Writing - original draft, The authors all contributed all aspects of the design, investigation, and writing of the study. J.B. Haskins: Investigation, Writing - original draft, The authors all contributed all aspects of the design, investigation, and writing of the study. The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023