An orthotropic non-local approach to modeling intra-laminar damage progression in laminated composites

A non-local macroscopic constitutive model is presented to simulate the progression of intra-laminar damage in laminated composite structures. A novel feature of the model is an orthotropic, non-local averaging scheme that is specially designed to capture the preferred path of damage / fracture propagation in laminated structures consisting of strongly orthotropic layers. In addition to maintaining the objectivity of the numerical results,...