There are not that many books that give a begineer a practical overview of
how to design with composites. It is a art leaned by a small number of
engineers who to date have not been very prolific and writing down what they
know .... try the following for starters.

Niu "composite Airframe Structures" not a cheap book but about the best
general intro but it will not give you everything you are going to need.

Tsai, Stephen. W. "Composites Design" Think Composites or the earlier
book by Tsai and Hahn (actaually better in some respects that the later Tsai
volume IMHO)

Daniel and Ishai "Engineering Mechanics of Composite Materials"

I will post more referenes on monday and I get to work .... cannot remember
them all right now.

You are going to need design allowables ... if doing a simple wet layup then
perhaps the best source of such data is the old ANC-17. This was replaced by
MIL-HDBK-17 but this only contains data for a lot of more advanced prepreg
materials.

If you want to use prepreg than my guess is that it will be a low
temperature cure material and the best source of data for these materials
are the AGATE style data bases supplied by many of the manufacturers such as
Fibercote, Toray and Newport for their materials.

Actually some of the best sources of info are the design manuals from some
of the large airplane manufacturers - if you can get hold of them. This is
because a lot of the more practical aspects of design and analysis are
simply not covered in the more academic texts.

I would not recommend the popular 2 volume book from a well know engineer of
homebuilts. They are really too superficial .... they lack any real meat
IMO. Interesting background info but probably not worth the price if you are
expecting a design text.

You cannot really design composite structures without some software as well
.... as a minimum you will need a laminate analysis program such as Tsai's
Genlam. Ideally you will have an FEA program that has laminate elements.

There are a lot of courses out there on composite design but in reality most
of these should be called an intro to laminate theory or something. My
experience is that they usually don't talk much about the practical issues
and problems associated with the design of composites (allowables, hot wet,
strain limits, through thickness and edge effects etc) ... concentrating
instead on the more academic aspects of pure analysis.

Also check the FAA web site there are some interesting AC's, Memo's,
research reports etc that address some of the major issues ... this is the
sort of info you will not find in text books and university courses.

Finally grab some repair manuals for certificated composite airplanes and
gliders ... many of these show details of all the laminates (materials, #
ply's, ply orientation etc). A careful study of some airplanes designed by
people who know what they are doing can be worth more than a dozen texts.

If you have specific questions fire away.

wrote in message
ups.com...
Any recommendations for textbooks addressing designing, especially
stress
analysis, with composite materials?

--

FF