Structural Reliability Analysis of Laminated CMC Components

For laminated ceramic matrix composite (CMC) materials to realize their full potential in aerospace applications design, methods and protocols are a necessity. This paper focuses on the time-independent failure response of these materials and presents a reliability analysis associated with the initiation of matrix cracking. It highlights a public domain computer algorithm that has been coupled with the laminate analysis of a finite element code and which serves as a design aid to analyze structural components made from laminated CMC materials. Issues relevant to the effect of the size of the component are discussed, and a parameter estimation procedure is presented. The estimation procedure allows three parameters to be calculated from a failure population that has an underlying Weibull distribution.