Identification of the Mechanical Properties of Composite Materials by Inverse Analysis

A procedure based on the principles of inverse analysis has been employed to identify the elastic material parameters and the strength characteristics of epoxy carbon fiber reinforced composite laminates. By adopting a classical optimization algorithm, elasticity parameters are chosen by minimizing the mean squared error between the values predicted by the classical theory of elastic laminates and the experimentally observed ones. The average modulus of the laminate has been calculated from elastic parameters of laminas by implementing the classical equations of anisotropic elasticity in a subroutine, in order to speed up the optimization process. In a similar fashion, even though under strongly simplifying hypothesis, the strength characteristic parameters of laminas have been identified by inverse analysis, with the aim of assessing the strength of the composite laminates in the case of complex stress state.