Composite blade damaging under impact

Composites materials are now being used in primary aircraft structures, and other domains because of numerous advantages. A part of a continuous in-flight operating costs, gas turbine engine manufacturers are always looking for ways to decrease engine weight. This is the case of compressor blades which have to satisfy, for example, the standard bird strike or debris in order to measure the crashworthiness. Bird strike impacts are actually among the most challenging loads that composite blades must accommodate. Thus for the further development of composite structures, it becomes important to have available predictive tools for simulating the response of composite structures under crash or impact loads, which will allow to evaluate damage state in the structure in function of time. A composites damage model, without mesh dependency, is presented, and allows to obtain agreement with impact experiment. Examples of finite element simulations for the impact response of blade based on this materials model are developped. These numerical results correspond to a bird strike on an equivalent composites blade, and insists on damage evolution in structure