Shells Made of Composite Material

In all of the preceding chapters, the shell material was assumed to be homogeneous and isotropic. Because of the need for lightweight designs (e.g., in space applications) composite shell materials have become more and more common. One of the advantages of composite materials is that one can design directional properties into them almost on demand. The disadvantage is that structures built with composite materials are more difficult to analyze and even to understand in their idiosyncracies of behavior and failure.