Design of Composite Structures for Reliability and Damage Tolerance

A summary of research conducted during the first year is presented. The research objectives were sought by conducting two tasks: (1) investigation of probabilistic design techniques for reliability-based design of composite sandwich panels, and (2) examination of strain energy density failure criterion in conjunction with response surface methodology for global-local design of damage tolerant helicopter fuselage structures. This report primarily discusses the efforts surrounding the first task and provides a discussion of some preliminary work involving the second task.