Experimental and Numerical Study on Underwater Contact Explosion Damage Characteristics of Carbon Fiber-Steel Composite Cylinder

Abstract

With growing demands for vibration mitigation and blast resistance of marine engineering structures, fiber-metal laminate (FML) structures are increasingly applied in key marine engineering fields. However, research on the damage characteristics and numerical prediction methods of large-scale FML structures under underwater contact explosions remains insufficient. To address this gap, underwater contact explosion tests with a 150 g TNT-equivalent charge are conducted on FML cylindrical shells at 8 m water depth to obtain realistic structural damage characteristics. Meanwhile, a user-defined shell-element constitutive model accounting for anisotropic strain-rate effects is established, and numerical simulations are performed using the coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian (CEL) method. The results indicate that, near the charge, the dominant damage modes in the carbon fiber layers are tensile-driven fiber fracture and fiber pull-out; in the variable cross-section regions at the axial ends, shear damage and delamination prevail; and at the tips of circumferential cracks, compression-induced fiber buckling is observed. Pronounced interfacial debonding between the carbon fiber laminate and steel layer is associated with stress-wave reflections at dissimilar-material interfaces. The primary damage to the carbon fiber laminate exhibits a dominant cross-shaped pattern, while distinct circumferentially propagating cracks are observed in the inner steel layer. Compared with test results, the simulation yields relative errors of approximately 5.6% in global radial inward deformation of the cylindrical shell and approximately 8.0% in predicted damage range. Although the present numerical method cannot directly resolve detailed interlaminar delamination, the predicted severe matrix-damage region generally agrees with the region of severe delamination observed experimentally and can indirectly indicate the main delamination extent. Overall, the proposed VUMAT-CEL approach reasonably predicts the global deformation and macroscopic damage extent of large-scale FML cylindrical shells under underwater contact explosions, providing a practical basis for the blast-resistant design and performance assessment of marine FML structures.

Keywords

Carbon fiber-steel composite cylinder / Underwater explosion experiment / Failure modes / Strain rate / Coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian method

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