2.15 Damage in Architectured Composites

The high performance fiber-reinforced plastics have hierarchical reinforcement architectures. They exhibit complex failure processes that occur interactively and concurrently on multiple scales and are closely linked to the constituents’ behavior and the reinforcement architecture. The chapter describes different stages of the damage development and their link to structural levels. At the micro-level the onset of damage is influenced by the microscopic morphology inside fiber bundles and the submicroscopic organization of nano-reinforcements. The latter introduce strong inhomogeneity in stress fields and change stress concentrations at the fiber/matrix interface. The transition from the fiber/matrix debonding to the intra- and inter-ply damage is then discussed focusing on differences between laminates with unidirectional and textile plies. The experimentally observed phenomenology of the damage processes is supported by findings from simulation studies.