Curing Stresses in Composite Laminates

Abstract

Analysis of curing stresses in resin matrix composite laminates involves a temperature range over which variation of elastic moduli is appreciable. A method based on total stress-strain-temperature relations is formulated and applied to determine the curing stresses in boron/epoxy composite lam inates. This method is shown to be preferable to the incremental method because the former requires the thermal strains and the stress-strain rela tions only at the final temperature of interest. The use of incremental constitutive equations is also discussed, and it is shown that proper care must be exercised to insure inclusion of interaction terms that have no counterparts in linear theories.