Mechanics and Analysis of Composite Materials

Book excerpt: This book is concerned with the topical problems of mechanics of advanced composite materials whose mechanical properties are controlled by high-strength and high-stiffness continuous fibers embedded in polymeric, metal, or ceramic matrix. Although the idea of combining two or more components to produce materials with controlled properties has been known and used from time immemorial, modern composites were only developed several decades ago and have now found intensive application in different fields of engineering, particularly in aerospace structures for which high strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight ratios are required. There already exist numerous publications that cover anisotropic elasticity, mechanics of composite materials, design, analysis, fabrication, and application of composite structures but the difference between this book and the existing ones is that this is of a more specific nature. It covers specific features of material behaviour such as nonlinear elasticity, plasticity, creep, and structural nonlinearity and discusses in detail the problems of material micro- and macro-mechanics that are only slightly touched in existing books, e.g. stress diffusion in a unidirectional material with broken fibers, physical and statistical aspects of fiber strength, coupling effects in anisotropic and laminated materials, etc. The authors are designers of composite structures who were involved in practically all the main Soviet and then Russian projects in composite technology, and the permission of the Russian Composite Center - Central Institute of Special Machinery (CRISM) to use in this book the pictures of structures developed and fabricated in CRISM as part of the joint research and design project is much appreciated. Mechanics and Analysis of Composite Materials consists of eight chapters progressively covering all structural levels of composite materials from their components through elementary plies and layers to laminates.