Experimental and numerical study of hybrid (CFRP-GFRP) composite laminates containing circular cut-outs under shear loading

Previous works have established the response and failure behaviour of hybrid (CFRP-GFRP) laminates when subjected to a wide range of destabilising loads. However, to date no works have focused on plates with cut-outs under shear loading and quantified the influence of selective laminate shapes and hybridisation on their post-buckling response...

An inter-ply friction model for thermoset based fibre metal laminate in a hot-pressing process

Forming process with pre-stacked and uncured thermoset fibre metal laminate offers improved deformability compared to full-cured laminate especially for the production of complex structural components. This work investigated the friction behaviour at the metal-prepreg interface of glass fibre reinforced aluminium laminate through an inter-ply...

Damage characterization of laminated composites using acoustic emission: A review

Damage characterization of laminated composites has been thoroughly studied the last decades where researchers developed several damage models, and in combination with experimental evidence, contributed to better understanding of the structural behavior of these structures. Experimental techniques played an essential role on this progress and...

Micromechanics-based surrogate models for the response of composites: A critical comparison between a classical mesoscale constitutive model, hyper-reduction and neural networks

Although being a popular approach for the modeling of laminated composites, mesoscale constitutive models often struggle to represent material response for arbitrary load cases. A better alternative in terms of accuracy is to use the FE² technique to upscale microscopic material behavior without loss of generality, but the...

Implementation of a ply inclination in the Classical Laminate Theory

The use of the Classical Laminate Theory (CLT) is limited to laminates where all the fibres in a ply are oriented in the plane of the laminate. In some applications, it is possible that the plies will start at the bottom of a laminate and end at the top of the laminate. This means an inclination is added to the plies, which creates an extra...

Barely visible impact damage assessment in laminated composites using acoustic emission

Despite the key advantages of Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) composites, they are susceptible to Barely Visible Impact Damage (BVID) under transverse loadings. This study investigates BVID in two quasi-isotropic carbon/epoxy laminates under quasi-static indentation and Low-Velocity Impact (LVI) loadings using Acoustic Emission (AE). First,...

Clustering of interlaminar and intralaminar damages in laminated composites under indentation loading using Acoustic Emission

This study focuses on the clustering of the indentation-induced interlaminar and intralaminar damages in carbon/epoxy laminated composites using Acoustic Emission (AE) technique. Two quasi-isotropic specimens with layups of [60/0/-60]4S (is named dispersed specimen) and [604/04/-604]S (is named blocked specimen) were fabricated and subjected to...

The study of buckling and post-buckling behavior of laminated composites consisting multiple delaminations using acoustic emission

This study introduces a comprehensive set of designed and tested glass/epoxy composites, AE monitoring and signal processing techniques; (i) to investigate the effect of multiple delaminations on buckling and post-buckling behaviors of laminated composites and (ii) to evaluate Acoustic Emission (AE) technique ability to monitor the buckling...

Effect of stochastic material properties on the structural response of laminated composite materials: following the building block approach

This report, which from now and onwards will be called the main body of the thesis, covers the core of the<br/>problem that has to be solved. Generally, the aim of this thesis is to investigate a laminated composite’s<br/>structural response, made of FRP, when its material properties are assumed stochastic instead of<br/>deterministic. The...