Global buckling behaviour and local damage propagation in composite plates with embedded delaminations

Abstract

Finite element models were developed to study global, local and mixed mode buckling behaviour of composite plates with embedded delaminations under compression. The global modelling results were compared with corresponding experimental results. It is shown that the numerical results for embedded delaminations agree very well with the experimental results, whereas the difference between the results was high for delaminations located at the edge of the plates. It is also shown that at lower loading levels the interaction of global and local buckling is negligible. At higher loading levels the strain energy release rate distribution and the delamination growth potential at the delamination front strongly depend on the shape of the debonded region and the local buckling mode. It was observed that the local buckling mode was highly influenced by the laminate stacking sequence. In the course of global buckling a parametric study was carried out to investigate the influence of the delamination size, shape and alignment of a series of composite plates.

Efficient modelling of delamination buckling in composite cylindrical shells under axial compression

“…In a recent study by the author [11] finite element models were developed to study global, local and mixed mode buckling behaviour of composite flat plates with embedded delamination under compression. The results were in agreement with the corresponding experimental results.…”

Delamination buckling and postbuckling in composite cylindrical shells under combined axial compression and external pressure

“…An FE analysis was performed on a simply supported It should be noted that the proposed modelling is applicable for any shape of the delamination. In a study by the author [7], the combined single-layer and double-layer of shell elements were employed to investigate the global buckling behaviour and local damage propagation of composite flat plates containing embedded delaminations. A parametric study was carried out to investigate the influence of the delamination size, thickness, shape and alignment of a series of composite plates.…”

“…The other disadvantage is for use with the virtual crack closure technique (VCCT) for calculation of the strain energy release rate(SERR). The latter is explained in more detail in references [6][7]. An alternative method, which overcomes these difficulties and also simplifies the mesh generation, is to choose the reference surface at an arbitrary position within the shell's thickness.…”

“…The applied imperfection rested on an eigenmode buckling analysis of the structure, similar to the method employed by the author in Refs. [3,4,7,34]. The maximum initial perturbation was 5% of the thickness of the shell.…”

“…Almost all of the papers on delamination buckling deal with beams and flat plates. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. The early work belongs to Chai et al [9] who characterized the delamination buckling models by the delamination thickness and the number of delaminations through the laminate thickness.…”