X-FEM analyses of a thin-walled composite shell structure with a delamination

The extended finite element method is applied to stress analyses of composite laminates modeled by shell elements. In the proposed method, a thin-walled structure containing an interface is modeled by shell elements, and the nodes on the interface are enriched in order to model the delamination. The X-FEM code for thin-walled structures based on the proposed method is developed and is applied to buckling analyses of Carbon Fiber-Reinforced Plastic laminate with delaminations. The proposed X-FEM for shell elements was shown to provide appropriate results, which agree well with those obtained by the X-FEM for solid elements and conventional FEM analyses.

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