Advanced Manufacturing: Polymer & Composites Science

Dynamic Response and Damage Tolerance of Composite Materials and Structures

Advanced composite materials and structures are widely used in aerospace, automotive, marine, energy, and protective engineering because of their high specific strength, design flexibility, and multifunctional potential. During service, these materials are frequently exposed to dynamic loads, including impact, collision, vibration, cyclic excitation, and other transient events. Their dynamic response involves complex interactions among material anisotropy, strain-rate sensitivity, interfacial behaviour, structural configuration, and loading conditions. These interactions may induce matrix cracking, fibre failure, interfacial debonding, delamination, and progressive structural collapse. Damage-tolerant design aims to regulate these failure processes, enhance energy dissipation, and preserve structural integrity after damage. This Article Collection focuses on the fundamental mechanisms, experimental characterization, predictive modelling, and innovative design of composite materials and structures under dynamic loading, with particular emphasis on the relationship between dynamic response and damage tolerance.

The increasing demand for lightweight and high-performance structures has placed greater emphasis on the safety and reliability of composites under complex dynamic environments. Impact loading can produce barely visible internal damage and substantially reduce residual strength, while long-term vibration and cyclic excitation may promote damage accumulation, stiffness degradation, and structural instability. Energy-absorbing structures must additionally control progressive failure to dissipate kinetic energy without premature catastrophic collapse. However, existing approaches often evaluate impact, vibration, energy absorption, and residual performance separately, making it difficult to establish a unified understanding of the relationships among dynamic loading, damage evolution, and structural failure. Addressing these challenges requires the integration of advanced experiments, multiscale damage theories, high-fidelity numerical models, and material–structure collaborative design. Progress in this field will support the development of lighter, safer, and more durable composite structures for demanding applications involving impact resistance, crashworthiness, vibration control, and post-damage load-bearing capability.

This Article Collection welcomes fundamental and applied studies on the dynamic response and damage tolerant of composite materials and structures. Topics of interest include dynamic mechanical characterization and strain-rate-dependent constitutive modelling; low- and high-velocity impact response; repeated impact and impact–fatigue interaction; impact damage evolution and residual strength; energy absorption, crashworthiness, and progressive collapse; structural vibration, modal characteristics, damping behaviour, vibration control, and dynamic stability; and analytical, numerical, and multiscale modelling of dynamic damage. Research on damage tolerance of materials and structures is particularly encouraged, with emphasis on suppressing damage initiation and propagation while maintaining residual load-bearing capacity after impact or other dynamic events. Relevant topics include interfacial modification, interlaminar toughening, through-thickness reinforcement, particle- or fibre-based hybridization, bio-inspired design, architected composites, and additive manufacturing. Damage-tolerance assessment, including residual strength and life prediction, nondestructive evaluation, structural health monitoring, and data-driven damage identification, also falls within the scope of this Collection. Contributions integrating experimental investigation, theoretical analysis, and computational modelling, as well as review articles identifying emerging challenges and future research directions, are welcome.

Keywords: Composite materials and structures; Dynamic response; Impact damage and energy absorption; Structural vibration and damping; Damage-tolerant design

All manuscripts submitted to this Article Collection will undergo a full peer-review; the Guest Advisor for this Collection will not be handling the manuscripts (unless they are an Editorial Board member).

Please review the journal scope and author submission instructions prior to submitting a manuscript.

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is [5 May 2027].

Please contact Agnes Zhou at Agnes.Zhou@taylorandfrancis.com with any queries and discount codes regarding this Article Collection.

Please be sure to select "Dynamic Response and Damage Tolerance of Composite Materials and Structures" from the drop-down menu in the submission system.

Dr. Xiaoyu Cui is a Research Professor and Doctoral Supervisor in the School of Aerospace Engineering and Applied Mechanics at Tongji University, China. He was awarded International Postdoctoral Exchange Program Fellowship in 2022 and Shanghai BYL Talent Program in 2023. He also hosted the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Young Scientists Fund. He has been conducting research on impact mechanical performance analysis of composite materials and smart materials, as well as fluid-structure interaction analysis.

Dr. Zhongyu Li is an Associate Professor in the School of Automotive Engineering at Harbin Institute of Technology, China. He received his Ph.D. in Autobody Engineering from Jilin University and conducted doctoral research at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. His research focuses on the impact response, damage mechanisms and data-driven design of CFRP laminates, hybrid laminates, and composite sandwich structures. His recent work integrates experimental mechanics, analytical modelling, structural health monitoring, and explainable machine learning to improve the impact resistance of composite structures.

Dr. Zhaoyang Ma is a Lecturer in the School of Mechanics and Engineering Science at Shanghai University, China. He received his Ph.D. in Solid Mechanics from Peking University in 2019 and spent two years as a visiting scholar at the University of Miami, USA. He has been studying the computational methods for damage evolution of composite materials and elastic metamaterial design. He has conducted in-depth studies on the coupled failure mechanisms of progressive damage modes in composites, the development of high-performance damage simulation software, computational methods for dynamic failure in composites, and theoretical and experimental research on Lamb waves propagation in composite laminates.

Dr. Minghui Zhang is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Aerospace Engineering and Applied Mechanics at Tongji University, China. He has been conducting research on additive manufacturing of composite materials and bio-inspired structural design. Dr. Zhang has published more than 15 SCI papers in internationally well-known academic journals such as Composites Part B: Engineering and Additive Manufacturing, and has been granted 5 Chinese national invention patents and 1 software copyright. He also serves as a Guest Editor for the Special Issue “Advances in Enhancement and Functionalization of Polymer Composites” in the journal Polymers.