Computational Modeling of Damage and Fracture in Composite Materials

The work is focused on the study of damage and fracture mechanics with emphasis to composite materials which are widely employed in the aerospace industry. For this purpose, a cohesive-frictional model for the prediction of interlaminar damage and a non-local constitutive model for intralaminar progressive damage simulation in composite laminated structures were defined. The proposed constitutive models were developed for commercial finite element software ABAQUS by means of user-defined material subroutine written in FORTRAN. To verify the effectiveness of the implemented models numerical simulations were conducted and validated by experimental results available from literature.

Dr. Leandro Maio obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Naples Federico II, specializing in mechanics of fibre reinforced composite materials. His research is focused on the development of analytical and numerical modeling techniques to simulate the fracture and damage behaviour of composite structures.