| Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering |
Research Interests Studies of Damage Evolution in Heterogeneous Materials, Composites and Sandwich Structures Collaborators: M. Ortiz and G. Ravichandran, Caltech; Staff: J. Knapp and V. Chalivendra, Caltech
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This work concentrates on the experimental study of damage evolution in thick composite or sandwich structures subjected to quasi-static compression and out of plane impact loaded by high speed projectiles. Issues to be investigated include the formation of localized damage zones in individual plies as well as areas of high speed delamination between plies. High speed photography and optical interferometric methods are used to observe the phenomena described above in real time. Experimentally calibrated, 3-D numerical calculations using the recently developed cohesive element terminology (Ortiz and Yu) are compared with the dynamic impact experiments. The final goal of this two-pronged approach is to investigate appropriate criteria governing the dynamic decohesion behavior of layered or sandwich structures, subjected to a variety of out of plane impact histories. This study also involves experimentation on model layered structures (bi-layers, tri-layers) subjected to in-plane out-of-plane impact. Emphasis is given on the study of the sequence and interrelation of the various failure mechanisms of layer dillamination and matrix cracking.
last
update:
05/31/2016