Structural Analysis of Composite Laminates using Analytical and Numerical Techniques

A laminated composite material consists of different layers of matrix and fibres. Its properties can vary a lot with each layer's or ply's orientation, material property and the number of layers itself. The present paper focuses on a novel approach of incorporating an analytical method to arrive at a preliminary ply layup order of a composite laminate, which acts as a feeder data for the further detailed analysis done on FEA tools. The equations used in our MATLAB are based on analytical study code and supply results that are remarkably close to the final optimized layup found through extensive FEA analysis with a high probabilistic degree. This reduces significant computing time and saves considerable FEA processing to obtain efficient results quickly. The result output by our method also provides the user with the conditions that predicts the successive failure sequence of the composite plies, a result option which is not even available in popular FEM tools. The predicted results are further verified by testing the laminates in the laboratory and the results are found in good agreement.