Elastic-plastic analysis of reinforced composite materials

The paper deals with the implementation of two dimensional modelling solid elements with the discretization of the reinforcement, both of which can be analyzed in a plastic regime. Thus, ensuring a better representation of the real problem of a reinforced structure since some techniques use the homogenization of the section. The discretization of the reinforcement allows to treat this as a separate element and to study its interaction with the structure. In addition, it dispenses the constant generation of meshes with the formulation used. With the adopted formulations, the present work aims to study the behaviour of reinforced structures and the distribution of the reinforcement in the medium, in a random or aligned way. Considering the elastoplastic behavior of both, it allows evaluating the loss of rigidity of the structures, together with redistribution of efforts and, in some cases, the loss of instability by formation of plastic hinges and the interaction between the elements. The constitutive model for the plasticity adopted is the von Mises 2D associative with a positive linear hardening. The solution of this model was obtained through an iterative procedure. With the aim to ensure the correct implementation of the considered formulations, examples for validation and presentation of the functionalities of the developed computational code were analyzed.