Design of buckling and damage resistant steered fibre composite laminates using trellis shear kinematics

A Matlab (R)-based numerical tool, 'SteerFab', is developed to predict steered fibre patterns and to analyse the mechanical properties of the resulting variable stiffness panels using the finite element software, AbaqusTM. Based on trellis shear kinematics [1], both the steered fibre pattern and the shape of the corresponding initial undeformed sheet can be created by SteerFab. Two types of rectangular plates measuring 300 mm x 400 mm are considered in this numerical study, one with and one without a 90 mm diameter central hole. For the plate with a hole, the finite element analysis predicts that the optimised steered-fibre pattern achieves similar improvements for both a carbon-epoxy composite (similar to 6%) and a glass-epoxy composite (similar to 7%) in terms of buckling resistance load, while failure load is increased by about 5% for a carbon-epoxy composite and 10% for a glass-epoxy composite compared to the best performing equivalent straight-fibre laminates.

Automated summary

A numerical tool called "SteerFab" based on Matlab was developed to predict steered fibre patterns and analyze the mechanical properties of variable stiffness panels. The optimized steered-fibre patterns were found to significantly improve the buckling and failure loads for both carbon-epoxy and glass-epoxy composites.