Influence of Local Delamination on Assembly Variation Modeling of Laminated Composite Beams

Abstract

Laminated composite components have been widely used in engineering fields, such as aerospace engineering, automotive industries, marine structures, and civil infrastructure. Due to the inherent properties of laminated composites, the impact of local delamination defects will result in a decrease of assembly dimensional precision and mechanical performance. This paper develops a modeling method to integrate the local delamination defects into the single-station assembly variation simulation procedure. First, the local deformation induced by the delamination defects is obtained by using the flexible joint model of the bimaterial interface. Then, the influence of the local displacement at the crack tip on the assembly variation propagation model is addressed. Based on the variation model, the impact of local delamination length ratio (a/h) is further studied for assembly of composite parts, and the comparisons of simulation results show that the delamination has a pronounced effect on the assembly deformation of composite components. Finally, two case studies on variation propagation modeling of a delaminated beam assembly are presented to illustrate and verify the proposed methodology.