Delamination Fracture Analysis of Composite Laminates Caused by Local Buckling and Postbuckling

Localized buckling of delaminated sublaminates in composite plates creates high interlaminar stresses around the delamination boundary, and then often causes rapid extensive delamination growth. This delamination growth reduces the global stiffness and thereby lowers the buckling load of the laminate significantly. With use of the VCCTS technique proposed by the authors, quantitative multiple parametric analyses of embedded elliptically-shaped delamination growth are provided in detail for the first time in this paper. The new results in this paper show that whether a delamination grows or not is determined by both the geometrical and physical parameters and their relations, and therefore they can be used to predict the growth of delaminations with varied kind of parameters.