Closed-form solution for the buckling behavior of the delaminated FRP plates with a rectangular hole using super-elastic SMA stitches

Layer separation (delamination) is an essential threat to fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) plates under dynamic, static, and fatigue loads. Under compressive load, the growth of delamination will lead to structural instability. The aim of this paper is to present a method using shape memory alloy (SMA) stitches to suppress the delamination growth in a FRP plate and to improve the buckling behavior of the plate with a rectangular hole. The present paper is divided into two parts. Firstly, a closedform (CF) formulation for evaluating the buckling load of the FRP plate is presented. Secondly, the finite element method (FEM) will be employed to calculate the buckling loads of the plates which serves to validate the results obtained from the closed-form method. The novelty of this work is the development of the closed-form solution using the p-Ritz energy approach regarding the stress-dependent phase transformation of SMA to trace the equilibrium path. For the FEM, the Lagoudas constitutive model of the SMA material is implemented in FORTRAN programming language using a user material subroutines (VUMAT). The model is simulated in ABAQUS/Explicit solver due to the nature of the loading type. The cohesive zone model (CZM) is applied to simulate the delamination growth.