A finite element analysis procedure is developed for progressive failure analysis of laminated composite plates under in plane tensile loading. A finite element model is based on higher order shear deformation theory (HSDT) with seven degrees of freedom. The degradation technique used for degradation of material properties of a failed ply is a ply discounting approach. The mode dependant Hashin and Lee failure criterion is used for the progressive failure analysis. The results of first ply failure load and last ply failure load are obtained for different stacking sequence of composite plate. The results shows that a considerable amount of strength remains un utilized in composite laminates after first ply failure of laminates.

The present work deals with second order statistics of first-ply failure response of geometrically nonlinear laminated composite plate subjected to in-plane tensile loading with random system properties. System properties such as the material properties and lamina plate thickness are modeled as independent random variables.The mathematical formulation is based on higher order shear deformation theory (HSDT) with von-Karman nonlinear kinematics. An efficient C⁰ nonlinear finite element method based on direct iterative procedure in conjunction with a first order perturbation approach (FOPT) is extended successfully and applied for failure problem in random environment and is employed to evaluate the dimensionless mean failure load and variance of failure index by modeling the system properties as basic random variables using Tsai-Wu and Hoffman failure criteria.Typical numerical results are presented to examine the effect of amplitude ratios, boundary conditions, lamination schemes with random system properties for different failure criterion.The results obtained using present solution approach is validated with the results available in the literatures.