Meshfree modeling in laminated composites

A problem of increasing importance in the aerospace industry is in detailed modeling of explicit fracture in laminated composite materials. For design applications, the simulation must be capable of initiation and propagation of changes in the problem domain. Further, these changes must be able to be incorporated within a design-scale simulation. The use of a visibility condition, coupled with the local and dynamic nature of meshfree shape function construction allows one to initiate and explicitly open and propagate holes inside a previously continuous problem domain. The method to be presented naturally couples to a hierarchical multi-scale material model incorporating external knowldege bases to achieve the goal of a practical explicit fracture modeling capability for full-scale problems.