The FATIMA project proposed by the consortium worked on testing and fatigue prediction of carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP) as required in call JTI-CS-2010-3-ECO-01-007. The challenging objective was to go beyond the state of the art in terms of approaches to account for humidity, multi-ply and multi-axiality effects in organic laminate structures. Intensive work in the field resulted in a number of concepts for accelerated lifetime predictions for carbon fibre reinforced polymers.

Within FATIMA, these concepts were adapted to the material provided by the partners of the Clean Sky consortium. The proposed methodology and integration into the fatigue testing procedure approached expansions addressing humidity effects, different stack-up structures and combined loading of these composite structures. Appropriate models of a multitude of specific laminate structures were provided as a tool box for composing desired laminates consisting of plies with known behaviour. Failure criteria developed for predicting the damage in composite materials due to multi-axial loads were evaluated, selected and advanced to meet the objectives of the call.