Keywords: laminated composite, virtual testing, damage, splits..

Composite materials are more and more used in mechanical design especially in the aeronautic and space industries. The purpose of this paper is to develop tools for the virtual structural testing of laminated composite. The main difficulty with the mesomodels used for virtual structural testing is to reproduce splits which are very thin macrocracks inside the plies. One way to address the problem is to introduce a priori cohesive interfaces inside the plies and parallel to the fibres. Such an approach is interesting to analyse a particular test but is not an answer to virtual structural testing. Here, one introduces a new approach where the splits are not a priori introduced. Their initiation is defined from an ad hoc criterion and then a cohesive interface is set. The LMT damage mesomodel is used; it is defined by two elements: the ply and the interface. These two elements contain damage variables that describe the different ways a composite material can damage: rupture of fibers, delamination, etc. The methodology has been implemented and computations have been done using the SAMCEF software. The results are also checked on some problems with singularities.

purchase the full-text of this paper (price £20)

go to the previous paper
go to the next paper
return to the table of contents
return to the book description
purchase this book (price £65 +P&P)