Fracture of laminated panels in tension

Composites have become very important nowadays. It has been used in many structures especially when light weight is of utmost important like in the racing car and airplane. The increased usage of composites is followed by the research on them. A lot of researchers have studied about composites and many of them studied about fracture in composites. Despite that fact, there are still numerous areas in fracture of composite that still need to be explored. This current research focuses on fracture in composites with initial delamination. The composites that will be used here is continuous carbon fiber reinforced polymer and the only position of the delamination that will be focused on is parallel to the load. Furthermore, the load will not directly cause the initial delamination to propagate. The crack propagation will be caused by the coupling due to the existence of unsymmetric sublaminate as a direct result of delamination. Finite element models have been developed to investigate the crack propagation and the main mode of failure. Two fracture parameters will be used here, energy release rate and stress intensity factor. The finite element results showed that some delaminations in the laminates have probability to propagate and the other have no possibility to propagate. It depends on the stacking sequence of laminates, delamination position and delamination length.Master of Engineering (MAE