Progressive failure analysis of fiber-reinforced laminated composites containing a hole

The present work aims to obtain failure loads for open-hole unidirectional composite plates under tensile loading. For this purpose, a user-defined material model in the finite element analysis package, ABAQUS, was developed to predict the failure load of the open-hole composite laminates using progressive failure analysis. Hashin and modified Yamanda-Sun’s failure criteria with complete and Camanho’s material degradation model are studied. In order to achieve the most accurate predictions, the influence of failure criteria and property degradation rules are investigated and failure loads and failure modes of the composites are compared with the same experimental test results from literature. A good agreement between experimental results and numerical predictions was observed.