A particular criterion for progressive failure analysis of carbon/phenolic tape-wounded conic shells

Conic shell structures are widely used in aerospace industries. In the literature various models have been proposed to failure analysis of composite materials. Clearly, each model has a favorable range of applications. In this paper tensile, compressive, shear and thermal expansion properties of tape-wounded Carbon/Phenolic composites are firstly measured at various temperatures in range 23–200°C. The captured properties are then taken into account to progressive failure analysis of a conic Carbon/Phenolic structure under internal pressure and thermal loadings. For this end, a particular failure criterion is proposed to predict failure in the composite structures with a reasonable margin of safety. The enhanced model is then implemented into the commercial finite element software of ABAQUS via a developed user material (UMAT) subroutine utilizing a suitable solution algorithm. Advantages of the model are assessed and comparisons with other failure criteria as well as experiment are presented.