Impact-induced damage analysis tools for laminated composites

The aim of the present work is to produce a validated set of design/analysis software tools called ADANIDEC, in the shape of finite element programs, for the selection and impact-induced damage evaluation of laminated composite structures for engineering design. The first part of this paper summarises our previous work[1] on the impact-induced damage analysis of laminated composites which includes: the formulation of material model, based on phenomenological continuum damage mechanics for a number of selected laminated composites, and experimental tests to evaluate the constants in the damage evolution law; development of algorithms and of a computer program to represent the above material models and their incorporation into the dynamic analysis codes using three-dimensional finite element techniques; the design of a multi-level (component, lamina, laminate) material database to accumulate and to retrieve information on specific composite materials. A Graphical User Interface has been developed and pull-down menus lead the user to multi-level material selection from the database which when combined with the use of finite element based numerical tools enables the rapid identification of the optimum materials for a specific design. In the second part, the structural analysis scheme and the general view on the use of the ADANIDEC program is described. To illustrate the ability of the numerical procedure, the damage accumulation and the global displacement calculations for laminates subjected to local and global impact loads were performed and compared with experimental observations.