Phase-field simulation of delamination in laminated composite plates: Isogeometric formulation

This paper presents a new, simplified approach to model the delamination phenomenon in laminated composites, where the drawbacks of the existing theories might be avoided. To this end, a phase-field model (PFM) is implemented to capture the irregularities in the crack fronts of the bond interface and an isogeometric analysis (IGA) is used to discretize the interface domain. The IGA methodology provides a higher-order continuity in the solution domain, leading to enhanced accuracy and significantly reduced computational cost. Several verifications and engineering examples are presented to validate and investigate the efficiency of the developed formulation in predicting the delamination behavior of laminated composites. Results reveal that the present approach can provide a smoothly-varying damaged interface with less computational cost than other classical methods. Moreover, the developed phase-field method reveals higher sensitivity of the interface fracture patterns to the stacking configurations than the cohesive finite element one.