Verification of a manual mesh moving finite element analysis procedure for modeling ablation in laminated composite materials

One of the prevalent approaches to model ablation problems is to use the UMESHMOTION subroutine and the Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) adaptive remesh algorithm in ABAQUS (i.e., a commercial, general purpose Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software). However, the approach is not applicable for ablation problems when the material removal proceeds from one material domain to another, such as for ablations of laminated composite materials when the surface recedes from one laminate layer to another layer with different material orientations. In this paper, a novel procedure, based on manual mesh moving FEA with ABAQUS, is proposed to solve the ablation problems for laminated composite materials. The proposed procedure is verified by comparing the predictions of temperature and ablation histories of a two-dimensional isotropic panel (i.e., with single material domain) with those obtained using the traditional UMESHMOTION+ALE method. In addition, a case study is presented to demonstrate the successful application of the proposed procedure for the prediction of the thermal and ablation response of a laminated carbon fiber reinforced epoxy matrix (CFRP) composite panel subjected to a high-intensity and short-duration radiative heat flux.