With the increasing applications of laminated composites in all kinds of industries, it becomes imperative to detect delamination, a frequently occurring damage which causes substantial stiffness loss in composite structures. This paper presents an approach to assess delaminations (in terms of their size, in-plane location and interface) in fibre reinforced laminated composite plates using natu...

Integration of phase-change materials (PCMs) into building fabrics is considered to be one of the potential and effective ways of minimising energy-consumption and CO2-emissions in the building sector. In order to assess the thermal effectiveness of this concept, composite PCM drywall samples (i.e., randomly mixed and laminated PCM drywalls) have been evaluated in a model passive-solar building...

This paper describes analytical methods that can be used to determine the deflections and stresses in highly compliant graphite-reinforced cementitious composites. It is demonstrated that the standard transform section method fails to provide accurate results when the elastic modulus ratio exceeds 20. So an alternate approach is formulated by using the rule of mixtures to determine a set of eff...

An innovative actuation principle is introduced in this paper to drive a rotary motor using an anisotropic piezoelectric composite laminate. The driving element is a three layer laminated beam with piezoceramics sandwiched between two anti-symmetric composite laminae. By taking advantage of material anisotropy, torsional motion can be induced from in-plane strain actuation. With such structural...