This work aims to improve the flexural behaviour of unidirectional fibre-reinforced laminates by means of coupling an optimization procedure for quasi-isotropic configurations with the design space opened by dispersed-ply orientations. The design approach consists of finding suitable alternatives to traditional laminates (with fibre orientations limited to 0°, ±45^∘, and 90°), while maintaining their stiffness characteristics. This strategy isolates the interlaminar response as the objective function that is optimized to improve their flexural behaviour. To this end, a modified Ant Colony Optimization was implemented and geared towards optimizing the interlaminar stress profile, allowing plies at every possible 5° orientation, with the ultimate goal of delaying delamination. To validate the approach, a traditional reference laminate and derived fully dispersed designs were experimentally tested. The correlated responses show that it was not possible to improve flexural resistance. However, the typical flexural brittleness of laminates can be modified into a pseudo-ductile behaviour.

The capability to accurately analyse the response of multi-directional composite laminates during impact events is of high importance for the design of lightweight aircraft structures. In this work, both experimental and numerical analyses are performed covering a large design-space of laminates for all aspects from on-set of damage and barely visible impact damage up to clearly visible impact damage and full penetration of the laminates. The impact tests are simulated using a sophisticated three-dimensional continuum damage model, combined with an automated meso-scale model generation algorithm for ply-by-ply, material/fibre-aligned meshing of laminated composite coupons. To assess the accuracy of the predictions, an extensive validation test program of several configurations and impact energies has been performed, thus demonstrating that the simulations are capable of accurately predicting the damage and failure mechanisms under low-velocity impact loading. Not only the evolution of impact loads and energy dissipated are numerically analysed, but the competition of the dominant failure mechanisms from low impact energy and full penetration cases are also macroscopically replicated.