A Practical and Reliable Solution for the Damage Analysis of Composite Structures, with Applications to Automotive

Laminated composite materials have been successfully used in the aerospace industry for years. Today, the automotive sector must produce vehicles that satisfy strong regulations on gas emission. Carbon fiber-reinforced plastics, because of their high stiffness and strength to density ratio, represent a serious alternative to classical metallic approaches but generate the need to revisit the design, structural sizing and manufacturing methodologies of the parts. Concerning structural sizing, composites exhibit complex material behaviours, especially for heavily loaded structures when the assumption of linearity cannot be done anymore. The solution available in LMS Samtech Samcef is described in this paper, and demonstrated in the automotive context. Only static computations are carried out in this paper. Fatigue is also briefly discussed.