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Modeling the Effect of Damage in Composite Structures: Simplified Approaches

Description

Modeling the Effect of Damage in Composite Structures: Simplified Approaches
Christos Kassapoglou - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

With the ever increasing application of composites, the need to understand how composite structures in aerospace, automotive, marine and construction applications behave over prolonged periods of service becomes more pronounced. In particular, understanding how damage affects the performance of such structures and how one can design them realizing that damage and defects are inevitable, becomes a priority.

Modeling the Effect of Damage in Composite Structures: Simplified Approaches goes past traditional knockdown or safety factors used in design, and suggests models that can be used to more accurately quantify the effect of damage on composite structures. At the same time it minimizes the use of detailed computationally intensive numerical methods that cannot easily be used in preliminary design. It presents simplified approaches that provide insight on the effect of various types of damage from holes and cracks to delaminations and impact. These approaches allow relatively rapid analysis and generation of alternative designs for optimization and trade-off studies. This helps down-selection of robust and efficient design candidates for more detailed and more expensive analysis. Finally, the methods are combined into a framework for developing promising analytical fatigue models for composite structures.

Key features:

  • Presents efficient, accurate, analytical models for predicting the effect of damage on strength of composite structures
  • Provides design guidelines, and step by step descriptions of how to apply the methods, along with evaluation of their accuracy and applicability
  • Includes problems and exercises
  • Accompanied by a website hosting lecture slides and solutions

By presenting reliable approaches that assist design and analysis without the need for expensive numerical methods, Modeling the Effect of Damage in Composite Structures: Simplified Approaches is an invaluable reference for graduate students and practising engineers in the field.

 

About the Author
Christos Kassapoglou received his BS degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics and two MS degrees (Aeronautics and Astronautics and Mechanical Engineering) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his PhD degree from Delft University of Technology. Since 1984 he has worked in industry, first at Beech Aircraft on the all-composite Starship I and then at the Structures Research Group at Sikorsky Aircraft specializing on analysis of composite structures for the all-composite Comanche and other helicopters and leading internally funded research and NASA and the US Army funded program. Since 2001 he has been consulting with various companies in the US and Europe on applications of composites, damage tolerance and certification. He joined the Aerospace Engineering Department of the Delft University of Technology (Aerospace Structures) in 2008 as an Associate Professor. His interests include fatigue and damage tolerance of composites, design and optimization for cost and weight, and technology optimization. He has over 60 journal papers and 3 patents on related subjects. He is a member of AIAA, AHS, and SAMPE.