ABSTRACT
The growth of near surface delaminations, as a rule, is accompanied by their buckling. Hence, the joint analysis of damage, fracture, local buckling and global stability is frequently required to predict load-carrying capacity and fatigue life of composite structures with near-surface delaminations. Modeling of growth of delaminations in composite structures is similar to modeling of fatigue cracks in ordinary materials. The direction of growth is prescribed: it is the interlayer situated on the prolongation of the initial delamination. Evidently, such a Kirchhof-Love model is a generalization of popular models for sandwich plates developed, however, with the special aim of applying it to modeling of laminate composite structures. In micromechanics, both the modeling of the mechanical phenomena on the level of material structure and the continuous approach are based on the use of certain internal field parameters characterizing the dispersed micro-damage.
