An overview of the analysis of composite structures

Before we go into the case study for this chapter, it helps to have some background knowledge about composite materials. Engineering materials such as metals, ceramics, and polymers/elastomers are isotropic by nature. Although each of these families of materials is widely used in their natural isotropic form for many applications, each has its pros and cons. For instance, solid metals (as opposed to liquid metals such as gallium and mercury) are endowed with high stiffness and have high deformability, but are heavy and prone to fatigue failure. Ceramics also have high stiffness, but they are brittle. On the other hand, polymers/elastomers have good corrosion and wear-resistance properties, but they have very low stiffness and temperature-dependent properties. Put together, this indicates that no single class of material is superior under all possible desirable functional working conditions [1] (see the Further reading section at...