A progressive failure analysis methodology has been developed for predicting the nonlinear response and failure of laminated composite structures.The progressive failure analysis uses C' plate and shell elements based on classical lamination theory to calculate the in-plane stresses. Several failure criteria, including the maximum strain criterion, Hashin's criterion, and Christensen's criterion, are used to predict the failure mechanisms.The progressive failure analysis model is implemented into a general purpose finite element code and can predict the damage and response of laminated composite structures from initial loading to final failure.

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This work considers initiation of nonlinear waves, their propagation, reflection, and their interactions in thermoelastic solids and thermoviscoelastic solids with and without memory. The conservation and balance laws constituting the mathematical models as well as the constitutive theories are derived for finite deformation and finite strain using second Piola-Kirchoff stress tensor and Green's strain tensor and their material derivatives [1]. Fourier heat conduction law with constant conductivity is used as the constitutive theory for heat vector. Numerical studies are performed using space-time variationally consistent finite element formulations derived using space-time residual functionals and the non-linear equations resulting from the first variation of the residual functional are solved using Newton's Linear Method with line search. Space-time local approximations are considered in higher order scalar product spaces that permit desired order of global differentiability in space and time. Computed results for non-linear wave propagation, reflection, and interaction are compared with linear wave propagation to demonstrate significant differences between the two, the importance of the nonlinear wave propagation over linear wave propagation as well as to illustrate the meritorious features of the mathematical models and the space-time variationally consistent space-time finite element process with time marching in obtaining the numerical solutions of the evolutions.