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

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...