Study of thermal buckling behavior of plain woven C/SiC composite plate using digital image correlation technique and finite element simulation

In this study, the thermal buckling behavior of plain woven C/SiC composite plate is investigated by a noncontact measurement based on the three-dimensional digital image correlation (DIC) technique and finite element analysis. The plain woven C/SiC composite plate is fixed by a water-cooling steel frame and one-side heated by quartz lamp array heating apparatus. The buckling temperature and the first buckling mode shape of the C/SiC composite plate are determined from the temperature-displacement curves and full-field deformation that are obtained from the DIC-based experiment. A nonlinear finite element buckling analysis with initial imperfection is performed using the ANSYS software. In order to improve the accuracy of the numerical simulation, a clamping frame model is further proposed for simulating the real clamping boundary in experiment. The results of the finite element simulation and DIC-based measurement coincide well regarding the temperature-displacement curve tendency and critical buckling temperature. Finally, a parametric study is performed using the presented numerical model to investigate the thermal buckling behavior of plain woven C/SiC composite plates with various dimension sizes.