| Structural components made of continuous fiber reinforced composite laminates develop a substantial amount of permanent microstructural damage from the application of thermomechanical loads. Continuum Damage Mechanics enable us to describe these microstructural damage at the macroscale by smearing out or homogenizing through some averaging procedure. The damage entities are quantified by representing them with appropriate variables and averaging them over an RVE. Associated with the state of damage are certain material constants which need to be determined experimentally in order to calculate the reduced stiffnesses. These material constants are not influenced by strains or damage but depend on the laminate configuration, and hence with every new configuration a new set of material constants need to be experimentally determined in order to predict the reduced stiffnesses. In this research a set of simple laminate configurations of the type (... |
