Designing Composite Structures with Manufacturing Defects in Mind
This presentation introduces a practical strategy for designing composite structures while explicitly accounting for inevitable manufacturing defects. The approach integrates defects into physical models to assess structural performance and links performance metrics directly to quantifiable measures of defect severity.
By enabling cost/performance trade-off analysis, this strategy supports more efficient and robust composite design. The methodology is illustrated through two failure scenarios:
• Transverse tension
• Axial compression
Using stochastic simulations of representative volume elements (RVEs), we derive defect severity measures and predict failure behavior. These predictions are validated against experimental data, and parametric studies reveal how manufacturing defects influence design thresholds.
This work highlights the importance of coupling physical modeling with uncertainty quantification to enable defect-tolerant, cost-effective composite designs.
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