Fibre-reinforced composites with fibre-bending stiffness under azimuthal shear – Comparison of simulation results with analytical solutions

In Ref. [1], Spencer and Soldatos proposed an enhanced modelling approach for fibre-reinforced composites which accounts for the fibre-bending stiffness in addition to the directional dependency induced by the fibres. Although analytical solutions for simple geometries have been derived over the past years, often subject to specific assumptions such as small deformation kinematics, the application to more general and non-academic boundary value problems is desirable. Motivated by the latter, the numerical solution of the general system of partial differential equations by means of a multi-field finite element approach is proposed in Ref. [2] and the principal model properties are studied for a specific form of the elastic energy potential. In the present contribution a comparison of the numerical solution by means of the multi-field finite element approach against the analytical solution is presented for the azimuthal shear deformation of a tube-like structure. To this end, the general deformation pattern and especially the distribution of the stress and couple stress tensor are taken into account. We find that, although the analytical solution is derived subject to the assumption of small deformations, whereas the numerical solution is based on the finite strain counterpart of the theory, the simulation results are quasi identical, which verifies the numerical framework proposed