An efficient viscoelastic multiscale model for investigation on the cure‐induced microscopic residual stresses of composite laminates

Abstract The cure‐induced residual stresses have a significant influence on the deformation and mechanical properties of composites. Moreover, the cure‐induced residual stresses exhibit multi‐level and multiscale distributions due to the complexity of micro‐structure of composites and anisotropic characteristics. In this paper, a computationally efficient multiscale procedure is proposed to predict the microscopic residual stresses induced by cure temperature, cure shrinkage and macroscopic residual stresses, which is based to the linear viscoelastic theory combined with the micro‐mechanics method. The instantaneous microscopic residual stresses are expressed as a linear combination of the instantaneous temperature increment, degree of cure increment and macroscopic strain increment at all times of the cure process until to the current time. The proposed method is verified in comparison with the published results in literature and the microscale FEA at different length scales, respectively. The results show that the proposed method is about a thousand times faster than directly using FEA in the microscale RVE model once the influence coefficient matrices are determined. At length, the microscale stresses of all nodes of the entire macroscale model are examined by using the proposed method. It is found that the thermal‐chemical‐mechanical loads lead to serious microscopic stresses for the matrix and interphase constituents, especially for those due to the macroscopic residual stresses. Highlights Microscale residual stress is written as a linear combination of macroscale loads. Applying macroscale loads on microscale FEA model to obtain influence matrices. The presented model avoids repeatedly FEA microscopic to improve the efficiency. The online time required for the proposed model is much less than microscale FEA. The microscale stress increases the risk of matrix cracking and interface bonding.