Declamination is one of the most common failure modes of composite materials. It occurrence may be due to either imperfections in the production process or the effect of external factors during the operational life of the composite laminates, e.g. impact by foreign objects. The presence of declamination can reduce the buckling load of the composite leading to global structural failure at loads below the design level. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) deals with the development of two computational approaches to solve the moving boundary problem, i.e. the dynamics of the growth of a thin strip declamination in a thick based laminate. The governing equation is a nonlinear integro-differential equation where the unknown length of delaminated strip appears not only in the boundary- condition but also in the equation of motion.
