Thermal-mechanical damage prediction toolkit for composite structures subject to fire

A coupled fire simulation and thermal-mechanical response and damage prediction tool is developed by enhancing, packaging, and integrating our existing solution modules as an add-on tool kit for a commercial finite element solver such as ABAQUS. . This tool, for the first time, is able to model the fluid-structure coupled response of an advanced composite structure subjected to a pool fire. The final software tool features 1) characterization of a fire environment via a coupled finite volume CFD model with a finite element based structural model; 2) implementation of multi-level coupled analysis modules within ABAQUS via user-defined subroutines; 3) quantification of multiple failure modes and their synergistic interaction in composite structures; and 4) computation of time to failure based on the synergistic interaction of local and global structural failure modes. A one way coupling is used to map the time history of temperature data predicted from the CFD code to the temperature specified at Gaussian points associated with the ABAQUS structural model. Example applications of the fire simulation and damage prediction tool are given via a pre-compressed composite column subjected to a pool fire.