A methodology to predict thermal-fatigue damage in laminated composites is presented. Limited data is used to characterize the material system. It is reported that a small number of parameters are enough to characterize the fracture-controlled transverse cracking and the stress-driven fatigue damage due to void nucleation and related phenomena. A damage initiation criterion and a kinetic equation for damage growth-rate are proposed. Further, it is found that log(damage rate) is independent of number of cycles. These findings form the basis for a methodology to extrapolate available data.
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