Mechanics of Composite Structures

This book includes a detailed introduction to the mechanics of composite structures, i.e. thin-walled laminated structures as they are frequently used in lightweight construction and design. The book is subdivided into five parts. Starting from the basics of linear elasticity in part I, part II is devoted to the mechanics of composite laminates as relevant for the further course of this book and as employed in industrial practice. Part III deals with the buckling and postbuckling behaviour of unstiffened and stiffened thin-walled laminated structures and presents closed-form analytical and semi-analytical approaches for the stability analysis of such structures. Part IV includes some advanced topics such as free-edge effects and laminated shells before part V concludes with the analysis of laminated beam structures. This book is intended for students at universities, but also for engineers in practice and researchers in engineering science. About the author: Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Christian Mittelstedt studied civil engineering at the University of Wuppertal, where he graduated as Dipl.-Ing. in 1999. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Siegen in 2005 with a dissertation on stress concentration problems in composite laminates. From 2006 he worked in the German aerospace industry as a research engineer and from 2011 as a technical leader and expert in the field of structural analysis. He habilitated in 2012 with a thesis on the stability of thin-walled fibre composite components in lightweight construction and is the author and co-author of more than 200 scientific papers published in international journals, conference proceedings, but also officially recognised calculation manuals. Since August 2016, he has been head of the institute of Lightweight Engineering and Structural Mechanics at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Darmstadt University of Technology.