Calculating elastic properties of composite laminates

The purpose of this program is to calculate some properties of fiber-reinforced composite laminates. It calculates - engineering properties like Ex, Ey, Gxy - thermal properties CTE_x and CTE_y - physical properties like density and laminate thickness - stiffness and compliance matrices (ABD and abd)

Although these properties are not very difficult to calculate, (the relevant equations and formulas can be readily found in the available composite literature) the calculation is time-consuming and error-prone when done by hand.

This program can _not_ calculate the strength of composite laminates; because there are many different failure modes, strengths of composite laminates cannot readily be calculated from the strengths of the separate materials that form the laminate. These strengths have to be determined from tests.

The program has options for producing LaTeX and HTML output in addition to plain text output.

The program and its file format are documented by a manual. This can be found in the doc subdirectory.

If you install this program on UNIX-like systems with make install, the manual will be installed automatically. For users of other systems, copy the manual to a convenient location.

As of version 3, support for old style fiber properties (which also specified properties in the radial direction of the fiber) has been removed from the code. In the tools subdirectory of the source distribution a script called convert-lamprop.py has been provided to convert old-style lamprop files to the new format.

Requirements

This program requires Python (version 3), and the numpy module. This version was developed and tested using Python 3.7 and numpy 1.15.1. But older versions will probably work fine.

Developers

You will need py.test to run the provided tests. Code checks are done using pylama. Both should be invoked from the root directory of the repository.

There are basically two versions of this program; a console version (installed as lamprop) primarily meant for POSIX operating systems and a GUI version (installed as lamprop-gui) primarily meant for ms-windows.

You can try both versions without installing them first, with the following invocations in a shell from the root directory of the repository.

Use python3 -m lamprop.console -h for the console version, and python3 -m lamprop.gui for the GUI version.

Installation

Run python3 setup.py install. This will install both the module and the scripts that use it.

On a UNIX-like operating system, you can run make install instead. This will additionally install the manual.

Vim

In the tools subdirectory you will find a vim syntax file for lamprop files. If you want to use it, copy lamprop.vim to ~/.vim/syntax, and set the filetype of your lamprop files to lamprop.

You can set the filetype by adding a modeline to your lamprop files:

vim:ft=lamprop

This requires that modeline support is enabled. You should have the following line in your vimrc:

set modeline

Alternatively, if you use the .lam extension for your lamprop files you can use an autocommand in your vimrc;

autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.lam set filetype=lamprop