Experimental and Numerical Investigation on the Failure Modes of Thick Composite Laminates

The paper presents the results of experiments designed to point out the role of interlaminar stress on the bending failure of thick composite laminates with geometrical variations and plies discontinuities. A numerical approach is developed using the HKS/Abaqus Explicit code in order to predict interlaminar damage nucleation and propagation in thick laminates with explicit finite element analyses. Non-linear constitutive laws are applied to model inelastic mechanisms in the interlaminar layers as well as in the plies of the laminate. The numericalexperimental correlations show that the proposed numerical technique can model complex three dimensional stress states in the laminate as well as the damage development and its effect on failure modes of the laminates.