Thermal Degradation Modeling of a Composite Material

The present paper introduces a numerical study on the fire behavior of composites during exposure to a heating source at high-incident power. A three-dimensional novel numerical model is proposed, which is able to simulate the behavior of composite materials in fire environment providing the composites mass loss rate, heat release rate, and total heat released during the heating source application. The ANSYS commercial FEM software has been selected as the platform for the implementation of the proposed numerical model. The use of the ANSYS Parametric Design Language has allowed the ANSYS FEM code to numerically simulate, by a stop-restart incremental procedure, all the most relevant physical phenomena related to fire. As an application, a cone calorimeter experiment over a laminated composite plate has been numerically simulated, and the numerical model has been validated by comparing the ANSYS numerical results to experimental literature data in terms of temperature profile over the panel thickness, mass loss rate, heat release rate, and total heat released. An excellent agreement has been found between the obtained numerical results and the experimental test, confirming the validity of the proposed three-dimensional tool, taking into account the specimen edge effects, which has perspectives of application to the assessment of the fire performance of complex composite structural components.