Composite laminate thickness tapering is essential for weight efficient structures. This is achieved by terminating specific plies, but these can in turn act as sites for delamination initiation. One area of importance is the spacing between adjacent ply drops, which can have a significant impact on the delamination stress. In this work, a novel tape scarfing method that applies a tapered profile to dropped ply ends was used on unidirectional tapered laminate specimens with multiple ply drops. The effect of ply drop spacing on the delamination stress of both conventional and scarfed plies in tension was studied experimentally. The results showed that the scarfed ply drop configurations can completely suppress delamination in certain configurations. The scarfed ply drops also retained higher performance with smaller ply drop spacings. This indicates that in using scarfed plies, conventional laminate design rules could be relaxed and the weight of the structure could be further reduced. The underlying failure mechanisms were also investigated using both analytical and numerical methods. A simple stress-based formula for estimating the delamination stress of scarfed plies was introduced and shown to be consistent with both experimental and numerical results, which could be used (and further developed) to make tapered laminate design easier.

复合层压板厚度逐渐变细对于轻量化结构至关重要。这是通过终止特定层来实现的，但这些可以反过来充当分层引发的位点。一个重要的方面是相邻层片之间的间距，这会对分层应力产生重大影响。在这项工作中，将锥形轮廓应用于下降的层片末端的新型胶带切割方法用于具有多层下降的单向锥形层压板试样。通过实验研究了层间距对常规层和斜接层在张力下的分层应力的影响。结果表明，斜接帘布层落差配置可以完全抑制某些配置中的分层。斜接层间距也保持了较高的性能和较小的层间距。这表明在使用斜接层板时，可以放宽传统的层压板设计规则，并且可以进一步减轻结构的重量。还使用分析和数值方法研究了潜在的失效机制。引入了一个基于应力的简单公式，用于估算斜交层的分层应力，并表明该公式与实验和数值结果一致，可用于（并进一步开发）使锥形层压板设计更容易。