Failure induced by instability in structural composites under longitudinal compression

Abstract

Many types of loadings encountered in practical applications may lead to compressive stresses in the longitudinal direction. Therefore, the need to investigate potential failure due to longitudinal compressive stresses is recurring by itself. Moreover, ultimate loads can only be reliably predicted if failure models are able to pinpoint the onset of the damage initiation and its subsequent propagation up to catastrophic failure.It is expected that this initial research proposal will stimulate a creative and productive environment to foster further collaborative projects in the areas of damage tolerance, high and low speed impact, compressive failure modeling, ply-level modeling, strain rate effects and dynamic testing using the facilities available in ITA (drop test tower, split Hopkinson bar and high speed camera) and the University of Waterloo (compressive, combined load and fatigue testing machines).In the long term the ambitious objective is to expand research of damage tolerance models to include thermoplastic based composites, a trend that seems to lead to almost unlimited possibilities in terms of cost savings and performance enhancement of composite aerostructures. (AU)