Impact Response of Laminated and Sandwich Composites

With increasing use of composites in transportation, military ground and air vehicles, ship structures, infrastructure, sporting goods and the power industry, the understanding of impact and dynamic behavior is critical to composite designers and end-users. A wealth of knowledge has been published on dynamic impact response of composite materials and structures. Yet, with continually emerging materials and processes, there is a lack of systematic structure-property-performance relationships that provide guidelines on dynamic impact behavior of composites.

This chapter deals with the impact response of composites for the regimes of low, intermediate and high velocity. Material models used in finite element modeling of impact problems in composites are described. Using LS-DYNA as a finite element modeling platform, the modeling of progressive damage in laminated and sandwich composite, and its correlation to experiments for quasistatic shear punch and high velocity impact is described in detail. High strain rate impact behavior and nondestructive evaluation (NDE) of impact damage are also addressed. For each of these topics, details of test equipment, test methodology, instrumentation and test parameters, past and recent work are covered. This chapter is interrelated to two other chapters in this book, Chapter 3, and Chapter 7, and the information in the present Chapter complements the other two.