A mixed plate model allowing for arbitrary delatminations

Fibre-reinforced plates and shells are finding an increasing interest in engineering applications. Consequently, efficient and robust computational tools are required for analyzing such structural models. As a matter of fact, a large amount of laminated finite elements have been developed and incorporated in most commercial codes for structural analysis. This contribution focuses on the delamination phenomena in a thin structural composite. Since delamination represents a major source of degradation in the strength of a composite material, it is of significant importance to model suitably the delamination mechanism. What is peculiar to the proposed model is its ability, when delamination occurs, to automatically split the plate in two (or more) layers by maintaining the same space discretization, but introducing, for in- and out-of-plane displacements and rotations, a discontinuity which can move in a direction parallel to the undeformed plate mid-surface.