Investigation of transverse matrix cracking in fatigue for laminated composites

Abstract

One of the main challenges, which has emerged in the last couple of years for high performance industries, lies in efficiently designing lighter, less consuming structures, while ensuring optimum performances and the necessary level of safety. For these reasons, composite materials have been increasingly used, and there is now both an ecological and economic necessity of developing predictive damage models, able to provide a fatigue life estimation with a moderate complexity for laminated composites. Indeed, this could help (i) lower experimental costs, (ii) reduce design times, and (iii) achieve a fatigue life extension with the same degree of safety, through the use of appropriate safety factors. With this aim, a unified approach for both static and fatigue loadings has been developed to predict transverse matrix cracking in organic matrix laminated composites