Failure analysis of thick composite curved tubes

Abstract

In the present paper, a progressive failure analysis of thick laminated composite curved tubes subjected to pure bending moment is conducted proposing a novel high-order displacement-based method. The most general displacement field of elasticity of thick laminated composite curved tubes is developed employing a displacement approach of Toroidal Elasticity and the layer-wise method. Subsequently, the accuracy of the proposed method is verified by comparing numerical results obtained by the proposed method with finite element method (FEM) and experimental data. By employing the proposed method, a progressive failure analysis is performed using Tsai-Wu criterion. Finally, effects of lay-up sequences of thick composite curved tubes on stress distributions and failure sequences are investigated.