A study of the onset of flexural failure in cross-ply laminated strips

Abstract An exact solution of the equilibrium equations is combined with the Tsai-Hill failure criterion to facilitate the computation of the onset of flexural failure in antisymmetrically laminated cross-ply strips. Dimensionless data, i.e. initial failure loads and their associated centre-line deflection, are presented for uniformly loaded GFRP and CFRP simply supported and clamped strips. A significant feature is that the magnitude of both these quantities is very dependent on the loading direction, particularly for strips comprising a small number of laminae.