A study of failure criteria

of variable stiffness
composite panels

PhD Candidate: Yan Zhang

Department: AWEP
Section: FPP
Supervisor: M.J.L. van Tooren
Promoter: M.J.L. van Tooren
Start date: 01-06-2011
Funding: CSC
Cooperations: BIT

Fiber reinforced composites has been widely used in the field of Aeronautics,
Astronautics and automotives because of its own outstanding features, such
as high specific strength, high specific modulus, designable performance
and integral forming easily. This application can significantly reduce the
weight and improve flight performances. Advanced fiber placement
technology is applied on the production of many commercial aircrafts, such
as Boeing 787 Dreamliner (50%), Airbus A380 (20%), and A350 (50%).

Figure 3. Fiber steered panel

Interlaminar stresses
It is known that, as a function of spatial location, the stiffness distribution
of variable stiffness laminates is nonuniform, and this might result in large
gradients in in-plane stress fields, which contributes to the amplification of
the interlaminar stresses, and could lead delamination to the dominant
failure mode of these laminates.
A method to approximate these interlaminar stresses involving the use of
closed-form expressions of in-plane stresses and equilibrium equations will
be developed and applied to variable stiffness composite panels.
Meanwhile, numerical simulation for the stress and strain analysis of
variable stiffness composite panel is applied (with Abaqus 6.11).

Aerospace Engineering

Figure 1. Material used in Boeing 787 Dreamliner

Variable Stiffness composites

Benefits of the directional properties of advanced composites could be fully
utilized by varying the fiber angles of layup continuously from point to point,
which resulting in stiffness properties that change as a function of location,
and so this laminates are termed variable stiffness composite panels. In this
manner, it is possible to redistribute the loads, in order to respond more
adequately to planar stress variations and also divert the loads from the
most sensitive regions, such as holes and notches, leading to high efficiency
of composite structure.

(a) contour

(b) contour

Figure 4. Interlaminar shear stress distribution at the middle plane

for
[<-30|0>/<60|90>/<-30|0>] layup

Failure criteria
There are already a number of previous articles working on the failure
criteria and structural response of composites under different boundary
conditions during the last four decades. However, most of these failure
theories only focus on in-plane stresses, without taking account of out-ofplane stresses, such as interlaminar shear stresses. Tsai-Hill and Tsai-Wu
2
failure theory, which are widely
used,
2 2 are as following:
x

Tsai-Hill failure criterion: X

x y
2

y
2

xy
2

2
2

x2 y
1 1
1
1
1
1

xy

1
y

t c
t c
t c t c x y
t
c x
t
c
2
Tsai-Wu failure criterion: X X Y Y
X X YY
S
X X Y Y

Figure 2. Fiber orientation of the first and middle ply for [<-30|0>/<60|90>/<-30|0>] layup

A failure theory for prediction of failure initiation taking account of the

interlaminar shear stresses, will be extended and applied to variable
stiffness composite laminates. Paganos three layer case will be
investigated for both constant stiffness and variable stiffness cases as the
reference cases. A set of analyses with different layup will be carried out
to verify the prediction accuracy of the modified failure criterion.

Publications
Y. Zhang, F.F. Xiong, S.X. Yang, X.N. Mei. (2011) Optimization design of composite wing structure of a minitype Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Advanced Materials
Research, 156-157: 1532-1536.
Y. Zhang, F.F. Xiong, S.X. Yang, (2011). Numerical simulation for composite wing structure design optimization of a minitype Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, The Open
Mechanical Engineering Journal, 5: 11-18.