Objectives  In order to study the effects of impact damage on the compressive strength and failure modes of woven carbon fiber reinforced thick composite laminates, in-plane compression tests are carried out.

  Methods  The modified Hashin failure criterion and material degradation model are realized with user-defined subroutines to simulate the failure behaviors of laminates using the ABAQUS/Explicit modelling package. The effectiveness of the numerical model is validated through comparison with experiments aimed at the compressive strength and failure modes.

  Results  The results show that the impact damage reduces the compressive strength of the impacted laminates. The compressive failure mode of the non-destructive specimen is concentrated at the ends of the impacted laminates, while truncated failure occurs across the middle region. The compressive strength decreases with the increase in impact energy, but there is no linear relationship between the compressive strength and impact energy. The evolution of the damage behavior of laminated plates is closely related to the history of compression load. The damage failure of laminates hardly develops when the compression load is below the threshold of the failure load. Otherwise, the damage expands rapidly in the width direction, and compression damage eventually occurs across the whole width direction of the laminate.

  Conclusions  The results of this study can provide references for evaluating the impact resistance of woven carbon fiber reinforced thick composite laminates.