Abstract
Recently, bonded composite patch repair, because of its significant advantages over traditional methods, has been highly accepted in several industries, particularly in aerospace applications. In this paper, a multi-scale finite element algorithm is proposed to simulate crack growth of repaired plates under fatigue load by considering the effects of composite micro-scale properties. The algorithm is verified through conducting an experimental set up and the proposed model is in reasonable agreement with experiments. The influences of different fiber volume fractions (VF), number of layers and fiber orientation of composite patch on the fatigue responses of adhesively bonded patch are investigated. For this purpose, Python scripts are written to automatically increase the size of the crack in ABAQUS. In this study, glass–epoxy and boron–epoxy patches are selected with volume fraction 0.1 to 0.7, the numbers of layers of 4, 8 and 16 as well as 5 different fiber orientation lay-ups. The maximum enhancement of fatigue life experimented by the variation of volume fraction is 133% in the mentioned range. Also, increment in the number of cycles by about 287% and 172% were seen per different number of layers and fiber orientation, respectively.
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