Static contact crushing of composite laminated shells

The crush behavior of carbon-epoxy composite laminated shells with three different curvatures is investigated. The FEM package ABAQUS and the user-defined material subroutine (UMAT) based on the concept of progressive stiffness degradation were employed to simulate crushing until the specimens totally collapsed. The 2-D delamination propagation proposed by Davies et al. is considered to be an additional failure mechanism for some curved shells whose contact crushing forces are large. The ultimate strengths of the shells are accurately predicted by the presented method, and all experimental cases are accurately simulated and explained.