Elastoplastic Residual Stress in Composite Beams

Abstract Composite materials have been widely used due to their lightweight capability. For different industrial applications, hybrid beams have been designed to combine the potential advantage of each layer; for instance, for aeronautical structures it is usual to combine Glass Fiber Reinforced Plastic (GFRP) and aluminum layers. In this article a three layer beam is considered, a medial layer is made of GFRP and the other layers are made of aluminum. A detailed discussion about a semi-analytic procedure to evaluate the residual stress in such structure is presented, analyzing the influence of fiber volume fraction on the GFRP layer and the layers thickness. The results indicate the possibility of growing up plastic residual stresses in the aluminum layers.