A Study on Reduction of Thermal Interlaminar Forces of Fiber-Reinforced Laminate Composites Using Volume Fraction Gradient

This paper addresses an application of a fiber volume fraction gradients to reduce the interlaminar forces of fiber reinforced composites subjected to thermal loadings. The degree of the reduction in the interlaminar forces may be expressed by introducing a new parameter, so called, the interlaminar force parameter. Several cases of stacking sequences and models for fiber volume fraction gradients prove the availability of the new parameter which is defined in this study.