Finite element analysis of drilling unidirectional CFRP in different ply orientation

In the new era of Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0), the manufacturing processes are facing a new level of flexible mass production technologies. Hence, the high demands for simulations data of manufacturing production and operation are required for developing a Cyber-Physical Systems of smart machines. Some composite machining processes could be very expansive. Simulation is needed to reduce the manufacturing time and cost. Without considering the suitable parameter of drilling, damage occurs at the region over the hole’s boundary after the drilling operation is done. Thus, the goal of this research is to investigate the effects of drilling cutting parameter such as thrust force, drilling-induced damage and stress distribution of reinforcing carbon composite polymer (CFRP) laminate by developing a user-defined material model (VUMAT) subroutine in ABAQUS/EXPLICIT (ABAQUS, Dassault Systemes®) for different fibre ply orientations. The failure mode such as fibre tensile failure, fibre compressive failure, matrix cracking and matrix crushing was modelled and analysed based on Hashin and Puck’s criterion. The stages of drilling operation were observed and described in this paper with the drilling cutting parameter and the damage of composite was finely defined. The results proved that the relationship of thrust force is directly proportional to the feed rate with the difference of computational model are 8 % higher than the experiment. Among the ply orientation sequence applied in the simulation, the result shows that [ / / ] and [ / / ]  ply having higher thrust force with 401.84 N.mm and 390.53 N.mm at 500 mm/min feed rate as delamination extent, as the frequency of fiber pulls out at the exit region of the drilled hole increases as compared to the restricted fiber ply orientation 0˚ and 90˚.