Impact damage resistance of ring stiffened CFRP panels

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact damage resistance of thin CFRP panels using crack arresters in the form of stiffened circular strips in a range of geometries for panels of increasing size. Three types of stiffener geometry were used and a change of material and indentor size. The results show that the type B stiffener produced the best resistance to damage and the change in material also increased the damage resistance. The influence of the different stiffeners was assessed against a modified form of an earlier model in terms of force–time history plots. The model produced a good prediction for each of the three stiffener types against the corresponding experimental data.