Observations and Lessons Learned from Composite Progressive Damage Analysis Benchmarking Exercise

Abstract

AFRL led an effort with Lockheed Martin to evaluate composite progressive damage analysis methods in static and fatigue. This paper provides an overall summary of the effort, but concentrates on the prediction of fatigue damage growth of a [60/0/-60]3S open hole coupon. The fatigue experiments yielded non-intuitive results, resulting in poor correlation between the simulations and experiments during the blind prediction phase of the program. The accuracy of the models were improved by correcting the calibration approach to better capture the actual physical failure mechanisms.