LAUSR

Advanced composites are now commonly employed in modern aircraft structures, high-performance automotive cars, corrosion-resistant wind turbine blades, champion winning sports equipment, and many more applications in various industries. This is attributed to their high strength–weight ratio and high stiffness– weight ratio, making advanced composites ideal material candidates when strength and weight are of important consideration. However, despite their long service history, composites remain susceptible to impact damage, which often results in complex failure mechanisms such as delamination, matrix cracking, fiber fracture, fiber-matrix debonding, and so on. The issue with impact damage of composite structures thus remains an open problem and a challenging one, particularly with increased use in exposed primary structure while seeking low-weight minimum wall thickness configurations. In this special issue, papers presented cover a broad area of impact damage research, spanning from advanced modelling techniques to state-of-the-art experimental methods. Numerical works on novel computational techniques, such as peridynamic modeling, isogeometric analysis simulation, and tabulated failure model, aim to model impact behavior and damage phenomena efficiently and accurately. Recent trends in nondestructive inspection techniques, such as X-ray computed tomography, infrared thermal imaging, electrical resistance, and optical fiber sensing, are also presented to examine damage mechanisms closely and clearly. The composite materials investigated by the authors in this issue range from traditional composite laminates to triaxially braided composites, laminates reinforced with Z-pins, as well as foam core sandwich composite panels. Finally, the dynamic test conditions studied in this special issue span from low-velocity impact to high-speed ballistic impact, with interesting novel findings involving dynamic crack propagation and extreme temperature environments. We hope you find the papers in this issue insightful and enriching. Our aim is that this special issue will enhance dissemination of the latest research results and foster discussion among composite researchers regarding the latest trend on impact and dynamic response of composites. We thank the contribution of the authors, in which this special issue is a unique invitation following their presentations at the American Society for Composites 32 Technical Conference ‘‘Impact and Dynamic Response’’ sessions. The conference was held at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, from 23–25 October, 2017.