Series Preface

The field of aerospace is wide ranging and covers a variety of products, disciplines, and domains, not merely in engineering but in many related supporting activities. These combine to enable the aerospace industry to produce exciting and technologically challenging products. A wealth of knowledge is contained by practitioners and professionals in the aerospace fields, which is of benefit to other practitioners in the industry, and to those entering the industry from University.

The Aerospace Series aims to be a practical and topical series of books aimed at engineering professionals, operators, users and allied professions such as commercial and legal executives in the aerospace industry. The range of topics is intended to be wide ranging, covering design and development, manufacture, operation and support of aircraft, as well as topics such as infrastructure operations and developments in research and technology. The intention is to provide a source of relevant information that will be of interest and benefit to all those people working in aerospace.

The use of composite materials for aerospace structures has increased dramatically in the last three decades. The attractive strength-to-weight ratios, improved fatigue and corrosion resistance and ability to tailor the geometry and fibre orientations, combined with recent advances in fabrication, have made composites a very attractive option for aerospace applications from both a technical and financial viewpoint. This has been tempered by problems associated with damage tolerance and detection, damage repair, environmental degradation and assembly joints. The anisotropic nature of composites also dramatically increases the number of variables that need to be considered in the design of any aerospace structure.

This book, Design and Analysis of Composite Structures: With Application to Aerospace Structures, Second Edition, provides a methodology of various analysis approaches that can be used for the preliminary design of aerospace structures without having to resort to finite elements. Representative types of composite structure are described, along with techniques to define the geometry and lay-up stacking sequence required to withstand the applied loads. The value of such a set of tools is to enable rapid initial trade-off preliminary design studies to be made, before using a detailed finite element analysis on the finalized design configurations.

Allan Seabridge
Jonathan Cooper
Peter Belobaba