FAILURE ANALYSIS OF NONLINEAR LAMINATED COMPOSITE PLATES

摘要

In the design of composite laminated structures, it is important to accurately predict the load carrying capacity which greatly depends on the strength of the constituent materials. Furthermore, it is also important to use more realistic structural models for the prediction of the behaviour of the materials and structures. Improvements in the prediction of the stresses in composite laminated plates are possible by assuming a layer-wise zig-zag variation of the in-plane displacements, while a reasonable structural model for the material can be obtained by considering different elastic moduli in tension and in compression. This improved stress field can be used to predict the first-ply failure load by adopting one of the tensor polynomial failure criteria developed for anisotropic and brittle materials. In this paper an analysis of failure in laminates is carried out by using layer-wise zig-zag theories; moreover, macroscopic failure criteria in a Finite Element procedure will be developed to study the influence of some mechanical and geometric parameters on the failure behaviour of multilayered plates.