An Innovative Numerical Approach for the Mechanical Analysis of Damaged Laminated Composite Structures

The main aim of the present work is to develop an efficient and reliable computational approach to deal with the structural analysis of damaged laminated composite plates and shells. For this purpose, the strong formulation of the governing equations is numerically solved by means of the Generalized Differential Quadrature (GDQ) method, due to its superior features. Thus, the system of differential equations, which is obtained in the theoretical framework of Higher-order Shear Deformations Theories (HSDTs), is directly approximated by applying the GDQ principles. An innovative strategy is presented to model the variable mechanical properties of the considered structures. In particular, if the variation in hand is properly set up to obtain a localized rapid decay of the mechanical properties, a damaged configuration can be studied. To this aim, the engineering constants that describe the mechanical properties of orthotropic layers are multiplied by a reducing function, which can be analytically defined by the Gaussian function or by an ellipse shaped law. The effects of such damages are studied through a massive set of parametric investigations in order to show the influence of the damage parameters on the structural response. Several geometries are analyzed as well.