Modelling Impact Damage in Double-Walled Composite Structures

The paper describes recent progress on materials modelling and numerical simulation of foreign object impact damage in fibre reinforced composite aircraft structures. The work is based on the application of finite element (FE) analysis codes to simulate damage in composite shell structures under impact loads. Composites ply damage models and interply delamination models have been developed and implemented in commercial explicit FE codes. The failure models and code developments are validated in the paper by predicting transverse impact damage in composite aircraft sandwich structures and comparing numerical simulations with high velocity gas gun impact test data