First-Ply Failure Analysis of Helicoidal/Bouligand Bio-Inspired Laminated Composite Plates

Abstract

Among the first, the present paper focuses on studying the first-ply failure load for bio-inspired helicoidal laminated composite plates. Five different layup schemes, namely, helicoidal recursive, helicoidal semicircular, helicoidal exponential, Fibonacci helicoidal, and linear helicoidal, were studied. The performance of the five helicoidal layups was compared with the commonly used cross-ply and quasi-isotropic lamination schemes. Maximum stress, maximum strain, Tsai–Hill, Tsai-Wu, and Hoffman failure theories were employed in the framework of the recently proposed finite-element-based higher-order zigzag theory to determine the first-ply failure load. It was observed that the maximum strain theory predicted the lowest value of the first-ply failure load, whereas Tsai–Wu predicted the highest one. For some cases, Tsai–Hill and Tsai–Wu theories were not able to predict the first-ply failure load. For plates having free edges, the bio-inspired plates exhibited the first-ply failure load compared to the conventional layup sequences.