Thick Composite Crack Analysis

Composite materials have emerged as the materials of choice for increasing the performance and reducing the weight and cost of military aircraft. Nevertheless, reliable prediction of composites behavior in both static and cyclic load situations are far from complete, due to limitations of current analysis methods and to uncertainty and statistical variation of composite behavior under a given set of environment and loading exposure. In this SBIR effort, we therefore focus on applying the knowledge gained from classical damage mechanics in a Peridynamics framework - specifically concentrating on manufacturing defects and their impact on the composites performance under a variety of loading conditions. The required analytical expressions are developed in the framework of continuum damage mechanics by suitable micromechanical computations. Lessons learned in this field will be used to model manufacturing defects in Peridynamics. The methodology will be applied to a variety of laminate layups and the predictions will be compared with experiments and independent FE simulations wherever applicable.