Implementation and assessment of advanced failure criteria for composite layered structures in FEMAP

AMOSC (Automatic Margin Of Safety Calculation) is a SW tool which has been developed to calculate the failure index of layered composite structures by referring to the cutting edge state-of-the-art LaRC05 criterion. The stress field is calculated by a finite element code. AMOSC allows the user to calculate the failure index also by referring to the classical Hoffman criterion (which is commonly applied in the aerospace industry). When developing the code, particular care was devoted to the computational efficiency of the code and to the automatic reporting capability. The tool implemented is an API which has been embedded into Femap Siemens SW custom tools. Then, a user friendly graphical interface has been associated to the API. A number of study-cases have been solved to validate the code and they are illustrated through this work. Moreover, for the same structure, the differences in results produced by passing from Hoffman to LaRC05 criterion have been identified and discussed. A number of additional comparisons have thus been produced between the results obtained by applying the above two criteria. Possible future developments could explore the sensitivity of the failure indexes to a more accurate stress field inputs (e.g. by employing finite elements formulated on the basis of higher order/hierarchical kinematic theories).