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Stochastic Lightning Damage Prediction Of Carbon/Epoxy Composites With Material Uncertainties, S.Z.H. Shah, Juhyeong Lee

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

This study presents a novel stochastic modeling framework predicting lightning thermal damage in carbon/epoxy composites. The stochastic lightning damage model (SLDM) was developed with random distributions of composite’s electrical conductivity and void. The Box-Muller transformation was applied to generate random in-plane and through-thickness electrical conductivities with Gaussian distributions. The SLDM suggested that the predicted lightning thermal damage to carbon/epoxy composites increased slightly with the use of stochastic electrical conductivity, but the presence of voids did not significantly affect the damage development. The predicted size and shape of lightning thermal damage agreed fairly well with experimental results. In addition, the proposed …