NAFEMS Composites Working Group Webinar

Composite Laminates by Double-Double Technology

Wednesday 13 December 2023 | Online

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This exclusive webinar, hosted by the NAFEMS Composites Working group, on a fascinating area of composites technology - Double-Double Laminates.

Renowned expert Professor Stephen Tsai will give attendees a detailed insight into this ground-breaking area, and show why the use of Double Double is set to grow, due to it's simplicity, rationality, and sensibility.

Double-Double Laminates - A Summary

Traditional laminates in Quad have four fixed ply angles in 0, ±45, 90 with variable ply numbers. Double-double (DD) laminates have four variable angles in [±A/±B] with four fixed single plies as the building block, bounded between [0] and [90]. Quad is discrete and unbounded, cannot interpolate and be homogenized; DD is field-based, continuous, can zoom, and easily homogenized for having repeated building blocks 3 or more. Thus DD is simple and easy to use, and naturally symmetric and can taper to save weight and cost that can be 50 percent or more.

Layup can be continuous (no stop at mid-plane), with no cross-plying, and the resulting laminate will not warp, esay to inspect, repair and provide hard points. Ply drops can be in singles and placed on the exterior surfaces keeping defects, voids, wrinkles and discontinuities away from the laminate interior.

A much higher quality laminate

Many self-inflicted complexities of Quad like the stacking sequence, blending, 4-ply limit on nesting, mid-plane symmetry, 10 percent rule, interlaminar ply angles to be no higher than 45 degree, and load-carrying plies to be placed near the center of laminate can be things of the past. Quad laminates can have dozens of stacking sequences; DD has at most 2. For Quad its subjective selection prevents scaling of one design to another. A wing skin can have hundreds of Quad laminates. It can be replaced by one DD. Laminate stiffness can be defined by trace, and its strength by the area of failure envelope. With two single parameters, materials and laminates can be rated. They are equivalent and equal in stature. They are not random as they have been treated. Scaling is now possible. One panel for calibration will be sufficient to predict the stiffness and strength of all carbon materials and all laminates.

It can be shown that the compressive and shear strengths are not sensitive to materials. Like metals only tensile tests will suffice in many cases. Design allowable will no longer be the barrier for innovation and progress in materials and processes.

History showed conflicts and resolutions between particle versus wave, AC versus DC, digital versus analog, and others. In a more modest scale, DD versus Quad is an ongoing conflict. We wish to show why DD will survive because it is simple, rational, and sensical.

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