ABSTRACT
Cohesive zone models have been successfully applied to predict the damage from notches in engineering materials loaded in tension. They have also been used to determine the growth of fibre microbuckling from a hole in a composite laminate under compression. The usual strategy is to replace the inelastic deformation associated with plasticity or microbuckling with a line-crack and to assume some form of stress-displacement bridging law across the crack faces. This paper examines recent experimental data obtained by the second author for notched glass-fibre epoxy/honeycomb sandwich panels loaded in uniaxial compression. A plastic fibre kinking analysis and a linear softening cohesive zone model are used for the prediction of the unnotched and open hole compressive strength and the theoretical results are found to be in good agreement with the experimental data.
