In the previous paper, it was shown that both the volume fraction of the reinforcement and the order of laminations had a marked influence on the relative stiffness of the CFRP-Al composite laminates which were reinforced over the entire span.
In this paper, the bending behaviors of the partly reinforced structural model overlapped by shorter reinforcement is considered. The displacement and the strain distributions along the reference axes are calculated by the finite element method assuming anisotropic and isotropic characteristics for CFRP and Al layer, respectively.
It is found that the length and the thickness of the reinforcement have a marked influence on bending behaviors of the partly reinforced composite laminates, and the results by FEM are considerably different from the results by the beam theory in the case of extremely short length of reinforcement.
The results obtained in this paper provide the design data for deciding the length and the thickness of reinforcement in partly reinforced structures. Also the displacement function used in this paper can be applied effectively for the calculation of complicated displacement modes in the partly reinforced structural model in order to establish its bending behaviors.