The potential of composites cannot be fully realized unless their fracture modes and failure mechanisms are fully understood, and appropriate design tools for failure prediction are developed and verified.

Fracture of Composites provides a guide to work-in-progress, establishes methods and techniques and highlights future challenges to analysis, modeling, test method development and failure prediction.

In the first section, a number of analytical modeling approaches are presented. This is followed by the consideration of computational methods. Section III discusses damage mechanisms and failure prediction. Test methods for fracture characterization and notch effects are addressed in Section IV. The onset of delamination and growth under compressive loading is presented in Section V. Impact response, the analysis of toughened composites and the application of these composites to the fracture of marine composites are presented in Section VI.