Effect of Thermo-Mechanical Gradient on the Damage Mechanisms of Composite Laminates

The main purpose of this work is to characterize and discriminate the respective roles of the thermo-mechanical gradient in the damage mechanisms of composite laminates used in aeronautics in order to understand the initiation and evolution of damage modes. For this purpose, a finite element model of compact tension specimen with a series of virtual crack closure techniques is achieved in order to evaluate the energy release rate of transverse matrix cracking in composites. The continuum mechanics approach in combination with Hashin’s damage criterion is adopted to describe initiation and evolution for each damage mode proposed for carbon/epoxy laminates. The good agreement between the numerical results and experiments in other available literature shows the validation of the analysis and developed model in this paper.