Towards the design of a new standard for composite stiffness identification

This paper presents a step towards the design of a novel test for simultaneous identification of all the stiffness components of orthotropic composite materials. A simulator was adopted to numerically simulate the whole identification process. Synthetic images were generated and then processed by Digital Image Correlation (DIC) to calculate the strain fields. The Virtual Fields Method (VFM) was used to identify the material stiffness parameters and error functions were finally defined to evaluate the identification error. Two steps of optimization were applied to obtain the best design variables of different specimens and the optimal DIC processing parameters. Four types of test configuration were simulated including short off-axis tensile test, short off-axis open-hole tensile test, off-axis Brazilian disc and offaxis unnotched Iosipescu test and the most promising configuration was identified.