The anisotropic feature and prolific geometry forms (laminates, 2D and 3D textiles) of composites, as well as the revealing of novel manufacture technologies, provide great potential for its application in various fields, including aerospace, automotive, renewable energy and energy storage et. al. This, on the other aspect, also raises increasing demands on knowledge and methodologies for the failure analysis of composite structures under various complicated service conditions. The complexity of failure behavior for composites is due to the presence of failure phenomena (microcracking, fiber breakage/buckling and delamination) at different dimensional scales and the interactions between each other. These failure behaviors can also be influenced by manufacture induced imperfections, specimen sizes, loading rates and environmental conditions. To address these problems, multidisciplinary, experimental and numerical combined approach is necessary. In this work, a multi-scale method is proposed to investigate the impact response of 2DTBC. A validated meso-scale finite element (FE) model is adopted to simulate the failure behavior of the braided composites under different load conditions, taking into consideration the realistic test boundary conditions. Followed, a meso-macro modeling method for a six-layer braided composite plate is developed to study the impact behavior of the 2DTBC, providing a new tool for impact simulation of textile composites with great advantages in capturing the failure initiation and progression during an impact load. The impact simulation results compare well with the experimental results and provide insights on the impact failure characters of this material.

Dr. Chao Zhang obtained his Ph.D. degree from The University of Akron in 2013. He worked as postdoc fellow in The University of North Caronia at Charlotte and National Renewable Energy Laboratory from 2014 to 2016, and joined Northwestern Polytechnical University as professor in 2016. Dr. Zhang’s research lies in the area of composites, with a focus on analyzing the damage and failure behaviors of composite structures using experimental characterization and numerical simulation combined approaches. Dr. Zhang has published more than 40 journal papers on international recognized journals, e.g. Composites Science and Technology、Composites Part A、Composite Structures et. al. He is also an Editorial Board Member for Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, Guest Editor for Journal of Aerospace Engineering and Advances in Mechanical Engineering. He was awarded ASCE Outstanding Reviewers in 2014 and 2015 by Journal of Aerospace Engineering, Travel Award from the World Congress of Computational Mechanics in 2016.