Structural design parameters of laminated composites for marine applications: Milestone study and extended review on current technology and engineering

The demand for the application of laminated composite materials is getting significant in the marine industry due to the advantages of use and life, maintenance, and efficiency of requirements and design over conventional materials. However, these materials are known to be highly susceptible to impact damage mainly due to out-of-plane impact events involving multiple interacting failure modes. The novel characteristics of the marine environment, such as extreme environments and long-term seawater influence, pose unique challenges to the resilience of these composites. Considering the expanding use of composite in complex marine structures and challenging marine environment conditions, this paper comprehensively reviews the composite research and development in marine applications to enable predictive models that can be safely used to achieve sustainable, efficient, robust, and safe design of marine engineering structures. The reviews cover the composite applications in the marine industry, novel marine characteristics for composite material, layering mechanism, material characterization, and damage mechanisms in composites due to various loading conditions in four different categories (delamination, matrix cracking, fiber breakage, and complete perforation), parametric joint method (vacuum and adhesive), and the failure criteria (debonding and interfacial delamination). This research brings valuable contributions in enriching the understanding and design of laminated composite structures by adopting the latest research trends. Applying advanced materials and numerical simulation has brought efficiency and effectiveness to analyzing laminated composite characteristics. Thus, this research opens new opportunities for further innovation and development in composite materials.