Towards understanding residual strength and damage evolution in damaged composite laminates

Fibre reinforced polymer composites have found increasing use in aircraft structures. This means that fleet managers need damage assessment tools for such materials, in order to decide on appropriate sustainment strategies. Developing such tools is hindered by the difficulty of generalising from lab tests to predict the behaviour of full-scale...

Compression after impact fatigue damage growth in CFRP – what does no-growth really mean?

Impacts on carbon fiber reinforced composites (CFRP) can produce a complex internal damage comprising multiple delaminations, which is hard to detect from visual inspection. This situation is known as barely visible impact damage (BVID). Considering that every airplane faces several impacts during its operational life, and that the majority of...