Laminate composites are widely used in automotive, aerospace, and increasingly in consumer industries, due to their reduced weight and superior structural properties. However, structural analysis of complex laminate structures remains challenging. 2D finite element methods based on plate/shell theories may be accurate and efficient, but they generally do not apply to the whole structure and require identification and preprocessing of the regions where the underlying assumptions hold. Fully automated structural analysis using solid 3D elements with sufficiently high order basis functions is possible in principle, but is rarely practiced due to the significant increase in the cost of computational integration over a large number of laminate plies.
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