Modeling the Effect of Damage in Composite Structures: Simplified Approaches
Christos Kassapoglou - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

With the ever increasing application of composites, the need to understand how composite structures in aerospace, automotive, marine and construction applications behave over prolonged periods of service becomes more pronounced. In particular, understanding how damage affects the performance of such structures and how one can design them realizing that damage and defects are inevitable, becomes a priority.

Modeling the Effect of Damage in Composite Structures: Simplified Approaches goes past traditional knockdown or safety factors used in design, and suggests models that can be used to more accurately quantify the effect of damage on composite structures. At the same time it minimizes the use of detailed computationally intensive numerical methods that cannot easily be used in preliminary design. It presents simplified approaches that provide insight on the effect of various types of damage from holes and cracks to delaminations and impact. These approaches allow relatively rapid analysis and generation of alternative designs for optimization and trade-off studies. This helps down-selection of robust and efficient design candidates for more detailed and more expensive analysis. Finally, the methods are combined into a framework for developing promising analytical fatigue models for composite structures.

Key features:

• Presents efficient, accurate, analytical models for predicting the effect of damage on strength of composite structures
• Provides design guidelines, and step by step descriptions of how to apply the methods, along with evaluation of their accuracy and applicability
• Includes problems and exercises
• Accompanied by a website hosting lecture slides and solutions

By presenting reliable approaches that assist design and analysis without the need for expensive numerical methods, Modeling the Effect of Damage in Composite Structures: Simplified Approaches is an invaluable reference for graduate students and practising engineers in the field.