Design of buckling and damage resistant steered fibre composite laminates using trellis shear kinematics

Abstract A Matlab®-based numerical tool, ‘SteerFab’, is developed to predict steered fibre patterns and to analyse the mechanical properties of the resulting variable stiffness panels using the finite element software, Abaqus™. Based on trellis shear kinematics [1], both the steered fibre pattern and the shape of the corresponding initial undeformed sheet can be created by SteerFab. Two types of rectangular plates measuring 300 mm × 400 mm are considered in this numerical study, one with and one without a 90 mm diameter central hole. For the plate with a hole, the finite element analysis predicts that the optimised steered-fibre pattern achieves similar improvements for both a carbon-epoxy composite (~6%) and a glass–epoxy composite (~7%) in terms of buckling resistance load, while failure load is increased by about 5% for a carbon-epoxy composite and 10% for a glass–epoxy composite compared to the best performing equivalent straight-fibre laminates.