English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Even thought composite materials have been introduced in aircraft industries since the middle of the last century, only the quite recent decision of the most important aircraft suppliers to use extendedly these advanced materials for their new aircrafts (AIRBUS-A380 and BOEING-787) have made people aware on the great potentiality of composites in strategic fields. It is not rare to see in newspapers composite materials to be referred as “plastics”, really, if composites were only “plastics” they would not be used for such strategic applications. Indeed, composite materials for aerospace structures are properly “Fiber Reinforced Plastics” being the great advantages associated to the use of composites brought by the combination on a macroscopic scale of two constituents, namely reinforcing fibers and matrix (polymeric for example). Thus, the principal difference between composites and other materials obtained by combining more elements (such as metals alloys) lies in the fact that composite materials constituents differ at molecular level to each other and are mechanically separable (Jones R,1999)-(Mazumdar,2002). It is well known that the same material has higher stiffness and strength in the fiber form than in the bulk one because of the reduced number of defects, such as dislocations, that it contains. Being a single fiber of microscopic diameter useless to realize any load-carrying structure, the basic idea is to join and keep fibers in the required positions by embedding them into a matrix (polymeric, metal, ceramic) in order to obtain a material whose properties could be improved with respect to the ones of the constituents. Thus, within a composite material fibers are the load-carrying elements which provide the required stiffness and strength while the matrix material binds the fibers together and transfers the load between them. Since composites are materials that “can be built”, they can be designed to fulfil requested requirements in terms of both mechanical properties and corrosion and electrical behaviour. Many advantages can be obtained by using composites instead of traditional engineering materials (such as improved specific stiffness and strength), however high costs and lacks of knowledge in their behaviour do not make the use of composite materials easy at all. In terms of engineering analysis of the mechanical behaviour of composites the major concern is about their inherently anisotropy. For example, the application of a load in a

Virtual Crack Closure Technique and Finite Element Method for Predicting the Delamination Growth Initiation in Composite Structures