Damage and failure of advanced composite materials and structures are often manifestations of nonlinear deformation that involve multiple mechanisms and their interactions at the constituent length scale. The presence and interactions of inelastic microscale constituents strongly influence the macroscopic damage anisotropy and useful residual life. The mechano-chemical interactions between constituents at the atomistic length scale play a more critical role with nanoengineered composites. Therefore, it is desirable to link composite behavior to specific microscopic constituent properties explicitly and lower length scale features using high-fidelity multiscale modeling techniques.In the research presented in this dissertation, an atomistically-informed multiscale modeling framework is developed to investigate damage evolution and failure in composites with radially-grown carbon nanotube (CNT) architecture. A continuum damage mechanics (CDM) model for the radially-grown CNT interphase region is developed with evolution equations derived using atomistic simulations. The developed model is integrated within a high-fidelity generalized method of cells (HFGMC) micromechanics theory and is used to parametrically investigate the influence of various input micro and nanoscale parameters on the mechanical properties, such as elastic stiffness, strength, and toughness. In addition, the inter-fiber stresses and the onset of damage in the presence of the interphase region are investigated to better understand the energy dissipation mechanisms that attribute to the enhancement in the macroscopic out-of-plane strength and toughness. Note that the HFGMC theory relies heavily on the description of microscale features and requires many internal variables, leading to high computational costs. Therefore, a novel reduced-order model (ROM) is also developed to surrogate full-field nonlinear HFGMC simulations and decrease the computational time and memory requirements of concurrent multiscale simulations significantly. The accurate prediction of composite sandwich materials' thermal stability and durability remains a challenge due to the variability of thermal-related material coefficients at different temperatures and the extensive use of bonded fittings. Consequently, the dissertation also investigates the thermomechanical performance of a complex composite sandwich space structure subject to thermal cycling. Computational finite element (FE) simulations are used to investigate the intrinsic failure mechanisms and damage precursors in honeycomb core composite sandwich structures with adhesively bonded fittings.

A previously developed small time scale fatigue crack growth model is improved, modified and extended with an emphasis on creating the simplest models that maintain the desired level of accuracy for a variety of materials. The model provides a means of estimating load sequence effects by continuously updating the crack opening stress every cycle, in a simplified manner. One of the significant phenomena of the crack opening stress under negative stress ratio is the residual tensile stress induced by the applied compressive stress. A modified coefficient is introduced to determine the extent to which residual stress impact the crack closure and is observed to vary for different materials. Several other literature models for crack closure under constant loading are also reviewed and compared with the proposed model. The modified model is then shown to predict several sets of published test results under constant loading for a variety of materials.

The crack opening stress is formalized as a function of the plastic zone sizes at the crack tip and the current crack length, which provided a means of approximation, accounting for both acceleration and retardation effects in a simplified manner. A sensitivity parameter is introduced to modify the enlarged plastic zone due to overload, to better fit the delay cycles with the test data and is observed to vary for different materials. Furthermore, the interaction effect induced by the combination of overload and underload sequence is modeled by depleting the compressive plastic zone due to an overload with the tensile plastic zone due to an underload. A qualitative analysis showed the simulation capacity of the small time scale model under different load types. A good agreement between prediction and test data for several irregular load types proved the applicability of the small time scale model under variable amplitude loading.