Buckling and Delamination Growth Analysis of Composite Laminates Containing Embedded Delaminations

The objective of this work is to study the post buckling behavior of composite laminates, containing embedded delamination, under uniaxial compression loading. For this purpose, delamination initiation and propagation is modeled using the softening behavior of interface elements. The full layer-wise plate theory is also employed for approximating the displacement field of laminates and the interface elements are considered as a numerical layer between any two adjacent layers which delamination is expected to propagate. A finite element program was developed and the geometric non-linearity in the von karman sense is incorporated to the strain/displacement relations, to obtain the buckling behavior. It will be shown that, the buckling load, delamination growth process and buckling mode of the composite plates depends on the size of delamination and stacking sequence of the laminates.