Computational studies of composite laminates with single and multiple embedded delaminations by cohesive surface approach

Abstract

Fibre reinforced polymer laminated composite materials have outstanding properties such as newlinecorrosion resistance, tailoring capabilities, strength to weight ratio, thrust to weight ratio and so on that makes it suitable for structural components in aerospace industry. Its non homogeneous nature, however makes the modeling and understanding the failure mechanisms to be difficult. Further among failure mechanisms, delaminations referring to separation of adjacent layers are a major concern. These occur due to local instabilities such as geometric or newlinematerial or contact nonlinearity in the vicinity of inter-laminar defects. This will induce the delamination initiation and growth which reduces the strength and stiffness considerably under compressive loads. Therefore, an understanding of mechanism is needed to govern delamination initiation and growth to develop appropriate criterion to assess the criticality of the damage. One of the final failure would occur due to the combination of local and global newlineinstabilities and both of them could be a trigger for it. newline