First, a purely mechanical loading is considered. The lamina level homogenized material properties calculated in Section 5.3 are used to determine the macroscopic state of strain in a
both laminates subjected an axial force resultant, Nx, in the absence of other two force resultants, Ny and Nxy. The laminate resultants are defined in Figure 4.
Consider the cross-ply and angle-ply laminates under a loading case in which the resulting edge forces are [Nx, Ny, Nxy] = [100 kN/m, 0, 0] without a temperature change. The macroscopic strain state in each lamina is determined using the process described in Section 5.3 with a lamina thickness, t, of 0.2 mm. The homogenized mechanical strains in the cross-ply and angle-ply laminates are given in Tables 6 and 7 respectively. From these homogenized states of strain, the state of strain within both representative volume elements is found by applying the influence matrices according to Equation 8. For this example, the influence matrices shown in Table 4 are used to determine the strain in the matrix phase at the location (e1, e2, e3) = (L1/2, L2, L3/2). Tables 8 and 9 list the strains within the matrix at the selected point for the cross-ply and angle-ply laminates, respectively. The results show that the state of strain at the point of inquiry in each representative volume element can be very different from the homogenized state of strain in each lamina.
