Composite materials are widely used in aerospace structures, however, they are usually vulnerable to accidental and eccentric impacts from various multitude and complex loading conditions, such as dropped tools, gravels collision, bird strike, hails and so on. Thus, the study of the low velocity impact behavior of laminated composite plates is a very important task.
In the last several decades, a few experimental and numerical investigations had been carried out to study the response of SMA-reinforced laminated composite plates subjected to low velocity central impact [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10]. However, the study on low velocity eccentric impact are still limited. So far, the study of low velocity eccentric impact has only been reported by Shariyat et al. [
11,
12,
13,
14] in literature. First of all, they only investigated the low velocity eccentric impact analysis of rectangular laminated composite plates subjected to in-phase/anti-phase biaxial preloads (see reference [
11]). In their work, they presented a nonlinear finite element formulation to simulate a low velocity eccentric impact between a rigid spherical indenter and a laminated composite rectangular plate with asymmetric lamination structure. By considering the different contact laws for the loading and unloading phases, they investigated the effect of parameters (the specifications of the plates and the indenter, the eccentric value, and the in-plane preloads) on the indentation and force time histories. It was found that the compressive preloads in-plane will reduce the contact force (that is indentation values), the tensile preloads in-plane will increase the contact force, and the extensile tensile preloads may lead to higher damages. Moreover, they also investigated the low velocity eccentric impact analysis of transversely graded plates with Winkler-type elastic foundations and fully/partially supported edges (see reference [
12]). In their work, they make contributions in numerical simulation by taking into account the contact law, the elastic foundation, the material heterogeneity, partially supporting the edges, and semi-analytical solutions. The major novelty of their approach is a novel double superposition power-exponential global-local theory and a refined contact law to investigate low velocity eccentric impact responses of rectangular sandwich plates with viscoelastic cores (see reference [
13]). In this work, they investigated effects of the pre-stresses on the indentation and contact force, and the effects of the eccentricity on the impact responses of the sandwich plates for the first time. The results showed that the contact force and the absorbed energy will increase, and the failure will more likely occur in the low velocity eccentric impact. Furthermore, they further analyzed the accurate eccentric impact for composite plates with embedded the preloaded SMA based on a novel mixed-order hyperbolic global-local theory (see reference [
14]). In their work, they propose a higher-order global-local hyperbolic plate theory including both odd and even functions to describe the general asymmetric displacement fields; and moreover, Shariyat and his co-workers have considered some other factors, such as the non-uniform and time-dependent distributions of the phases of the SMA wires and different contact laws for loading and unloading phases.
Although some efforts have been made for studying the response of the eccentric impact on composite plates, the scope of investigations is still limited. Moreover, a comprehensive analysis for the low velocity eccentric impact of the SMA reinforced laminated composite plates is still lacking. Therefore, in the present work, we shall reexamine the low velocity impact, both central and eccentric, on square and rectangular laminated composite plates with embedded SMA wires, which are stitched on the top and bottom surfaces of the plate. In the present study, the numerical simulation is carried out by using Abaqus/Explict finite element software with version 6.14, dassault SIMULIA Inc, Providence, RI, USA. The paper is arranged four sections. The constitute model of SMA wires, the constitute laws of laminated composite plates, the cohesive zone model between SMA and plates, and the failure criterion of composite plates are discussed in
Section 2. In
Section 3, the modeling framework of the SMA reinforced square and rectangular laminated composite plate under low velocity central and eccentric impact are given. In
Section 4, the impact responses of the rigid spherical indenter for the cases of low velocity central and eccentric impact are analyzed, and they are compared with the results of Shariyat et al. (see [
14]). Moreover, the damage morphology patterns of SMA reinforced square/rectangular laminated composite plates are also analyzed, and the lateral deflection histories of different impact points in the top/bottom layer SMAs and the composite plates are discussed. Finally, we conclude the study in
Section 5 with a few conclusions drawn.