Developments in Ceramic Materials Research

200
M. A. Sheik
In spite of the big advantage of computational economy of the structured ‘brick’ elements
in ABAQUS/CAE over the tetrahedral ones, the complexity of the weave and presence of
sharp intricate curves and edge slivers between the fibre tow and matrix regions forced the
only option as the tetrahedral elements. In order to reduce the problem size, some local mesh
coarsening has been suggested at places where possible. An example shown in Figure 27 does
highlight this possibility but the reduction in the computational load on the hardware platform
has been minimal and therefore it is not considered worth the effort. A properly meshed Unit
Cell is shown with the matrix region in Figure 28 and completely without them in Figure 29
where it shows 1,300,955 elements and 240,066 nodes.
Figure 28. Meshed Unit Cell using a total of 1,300,955 DC3D4 elements.
Figure 29. Meshed Unit Cell shown fibre tows but without matrix region.
An inherent complexity faced during the meshing process was the internal mesh
generation around the sharp edge slivers shown in Figure 30. A local seeding bias of further
refined element edge size had been determined after many trials for an optimum value in
order to manage a complete element formation at these odd geometric regions.