The PhD project, financed by FIDAMC and supervised by the University of Seville, is focused in the development of improved analytical methodologies to estimate the unfolding failure in L-shaped and T-shaped sections of composite beams.
Nowadays, methodologies present a non-realistic dependence of the interlaminar tensile strength on the number of plies, due to the lack of accuracy of the calculation methods in those cases. Furthermore, edge-effects play an important role in the unfolding failure, especially when a curvature change is given in the section of the beams, and they are only obtained by using finite elements models.
These effects provoke errors even of a 100% in some load cases when using typical analytical models and the present work pretends to estimate them by an analytical novel method, validating it with finite elements results.