RESEARCH ARTICLE
Impact Damage Management of Composite Laminated Structures by a Probabilistic Approach
A. Riccio*, T. Russo, F. Scaramuzzino
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2013Volume: 7
First Page: 8
Last Page: 22
Publisher Id: TOMSJ-7-8
DOI: 10.2174/1874088X01307010008
Article History:
Received Date: 21/1/2013Revision Received Date: 30/3/2013
Acceptance Date: 2/4/2013
Electronic publication date: 30/5/2013
Collection year: 2013
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
A numerical procedure for the design of impact damage resistant composite laminated structures is proposed in the present paper. This procedure, based on probabilistic analyses, is able to support the design of complex composite laminated structures by accounting for the scatter in composite materials' mechanical properties (related to the mutable environmental conditions experienced by an aircraft component during its service life) and by accounting for the uncertainty on accidental impacts locations. A failure criterion, based on the determination of the threshold critical impact energy for impact induced delaminations’ onset, is adopted for the evaluation of the damage resistance of composite laminated structures, in the frame of the introduced probabilistic analyses.
The proposed procedure has been implemented into a commercial FEM platform and composite panels have been used as numerical benchmarks to investigate the influence of the combined material properties and impact location uncertainties on composite laminated structures’ impact damage resistance. A further comparison between two different stiffened composite panels designs have been introduced to highlight the added value of the proposed impact damage resistance probabilistic approach in terms of safety and effectiveness, with respect to the standard deterministic tools.