About Generalized Stress- and Strain-Based Damage and Failure for Anisotropic Materials

Abaqus/Standard and Abaqus/Explicit provide a collection of stress- and strain-based generalized damage initiation criteria as indicators of material failure. These general stress- and strain-based damage initiation criteria are based on maximum stress theory or on Tsai-Wu theory.

Damage evolution laws are not supported for these general stress- and strain-based damage initiation criteria. Therefore, Abaqus evaluates the initiation criterion for output purposes only, and the definition has no effect on the material response. You can specify more than one damage initiation criterion for a given material. If you specify multiple damage initiation criteria for the same material, the solver treats them independently. The output is in the form of a failure index that provides information about the proximity to failure.

The generalized stress- and strain-based damage initiation criteria provide failure measures that:

  • are indicators of material failure;

  • are postprocessed output requests and do not cause any material degradation;

  • can be used with all stress/displacement elements; and

  • can be strain rate–dependent in Abaqus/Explicit.

This page discusses:

See Also
About Progressive Damage and Failure
In Other Guides
*DAMAGE INITIATION

Products Abaqus/Standard Abaqus/Explicit

Damage Initiation Criterion

Abaqus provides the following damage initiation criteria based on different failure theories that can be used as indicators of material failure:

  • Maximum stress theory and maximum strain theory.
  • Stress- and strain-based Tsai-Wu theory (Tsai (1971)).

For each criterion, stresses and strains are measured in the local material coordinate system.

Elements

The general stress- and strain-based damage initiation criteria can be used with any elements in Abaqus that include mechanical behavior (elements that have displacement degrees of freedom).

References

  1. Tsai,  S. W.,  and E. M. Wu, “A General Theory of Strength for Anisotropic Materials,” Journal of Composite Materials, vol. 5(1), pp. 58–80, 1971.