A first-ply failure analysis of composite laminates

Abstract

A finite-element computational procedure is developed for the first-ply failure analysis of laminated composite plates. The procedure is based on the first-order shear deformation theory and a tensor polynomial failure criterion that contains the maximum stress, maximum strain, the Hill, Tsai-Wu and Hoffman failure criteria as special cases. By specifying the desired criterion, a first-ply failure analysis of composite laminates subjected to in-plane and/or bending loads can be achieved. A number of problems are presented to evaluate these failure criteria when applied to laminates subjected to in-plane and or bending loads.