Stochastic lightning damage prediction of carbon/epoxy composites with material uncertainties

This study presents a novel stochastic modeling framework predicting lightning thermal damage in carbon/ epoxy composites. The stochastic lightning damage model (SLDM) was developed with random distributions of composite's electrical conductivity and void. The Box-Muller transformation was applied to generate random inplane and through-thickness electrical conductivities with Gaussian distributions. The SLDM suggested that the predicted lightning thermal damage to carbon/epoxy composites increased slightly with the use of stochastic electrical conductivity, but the presence of voids did not significantly affect the damage development. The predicted size and shape of lightning thermal damage agreed fairly well with experimental results. In addition, the proposed SLDM was first capable of predicting asymmetric lightning damage to carbon/epoxy composites, which was not demonstrated by conventional (deterministic) lightning damage models.

Automated summary

This study presents a novel stochastic modeling framework for predicting lightning thermal damage in carbon/epoxy composites. The results show that the use of stochastic electrical conductivity slightly increases the predicted thermal damage, while the presence of voids does not significantly affect the damage development. Additionally, the proposed model is capable of predicting asymmetric lightning damage to carbon/epoxy composites.