Fatigue is one of the main long-term failure mechanisms in composite structures. In order to speed up the design process and to reduce the number of tests to be carried out for ensuring safety of new composite designs, virtual testing tools need to be developed that accurately simulate the various failure processes and their interactions under fatigue loading conditions.
In this work we present a numerical framework for simulating high-cycle fatigue failure in composite laminates. For modeling initiation and propagation of matrix cracks and delamination, the state-of-the-art cyclic cohesive zone model (CZM) by Dávila is used. The model only requires a few fatigue parameters based on S-N curves and simple engineering assumptions for including the effect of the mode-mixity and stress-ratio, thereby keeping characterization efforts limited
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