Forming of Laminates

Fibre-Metal-Laminates have excellent properties for aerospace applications, with GLARE as an example. The metal layers inside the laminate provide permanent plastic deformations for the whole laminate; in principle Fibre-Metal-Laminates can be formed with common sheet metal forming processes. The difference between monolithic sheet metal and Fibre-Metal-Laminates lay in the large number of failure modes for FML of which the delamination failure modes are unique for laminates. In order to predict delamination failure, the transverse shear stress distribution must be known. Different approaches to determine internal stress distribution of the laminate, on an analytical base, are compared with each other and with experimental results. The analytical model that was developed in this research is implemented into a stand alone software package to act as a design tool