LAUSR

Abstract Success in design and application of composite materials to a large extend depends on the use of the adequate strength and failure criteria. The World-Wide Failure Exercise (WWFE) is an international effort to establish recommendations on failure criteria for the composite materials. WWFE uses the macromechanical approach and considers the effective (averaged) properties of laminae as input in the analysis. Therefore, a prior fundamental issue arises on which micromechanical approach is better to apply to calculate the effective properties of laminae. The objective of this paper is to present a multiscale analysis of influence of different micromechanical models on the damage onset in the notched composite laminates in comparison with the available experimental data. The failure modes of the CFRP and GFRP laminated plates with a circular hole subjected to tensile and compressive loads are analyzed. The WWFE recommendations are combined with different micromechanical approaches including a VSPK micromechanical model recently proposed by the authors. It is shown that the VSPK model presents better predictions for a broad range of experimental data compared with the other models available in the literature.