Predicting progressive delamination of composite material specimens via interface elements

This article describes the application of interface elements to the prediction of progressive delamination in composite materials. The work has been implemented in two separate commercial finite-element computer packages, ABAQUS [1] and LUSAS [2]. In the former case, this has been achieved via a "user subroutine", while in the latter case the elements are embedded directly within the system, either in the standard "release version" of the code or in a research version, to which the authors have access and in which they have implemented various algorithms directly. Comparisons are made with a range of experimental results for composite material specimens. In addition to the finite-element solutions, closed-form results are also presented that are based on a corrected beam theory.