Matrix crack induced delamination is one of the predominant failure mechanisms in laminated composites under off-axis loading. However, there exist a reduced number of experimental studies on the literature specifically devoted to this failure mechanism. In this work, an experimental campaign focused on the occurrence of matrix cracking and delamination induced by matrix crack is presented. Five different carbon-epoxy lay-ups have been tested under tensile load, leading to different damage evolutions. The experimental data has been compared with a failure criterion recently developed by the authors. A good agreement between the experimental data and the predictions of the failure criterion has been obtained

This work was funded by AIRBUS under project iComp – the integrated method for the structural design of Composite components. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support provided by Airbus – Germany, along with the support of the Spanish government through DG-CICYT under Contract DPI2012-34465 and MAT2012-37552-C03-03