Material parameter sensitivity analysis for intralaminar damage of laminated composites through direct differentiation

Understanding the effect of the material parameters variability on the mechanical response of laminated composites is of great importance for many engineering problems. Not only an accurate sensitivity analysis enables to estimate how much each parameter under consideration affects the response, but the linearization of the output provides also the possibility to, for example, use gradient-based optimization tools and to propagate in an inexpensive way the material uncertainties. In this paper, a material parameter sensitivity study is carried out in the context of continuum damage mechanics applied to predict intralaminar damage in laminated composites. The sensitivity w.r.t. the input material variables is estimated in a relatively inexpensive way from a single run of the Finite Element (FE) model. The results obtained provide a good understanding of the influence of the material parameters throughout the simulation.