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In the steady quest for lightweighting solutions, continuous carbon fiber composites are becoming more approachable for design, now not only used in the aerospace but also the automotive industries. Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics (CFRP) are now being integrated into car body structures, used for their high stiffness and strength and low weight. The material properties of continuous carbon fiber composites are much more complex than metal, especially with respect to failure; this is further complicated by the fact that a single part is typically made from stacks of several unidirectional plies, each with a different fiber orientation. Hence failure occurs because of various mechanisms taking place at the ply level (matrix cracking, fiber breakage, fiber-matrix debonding) or between the plies (delamination). These mechanisms remain not fully understood and are investigated through experimental and virtual testing.

The need of weight reduction for fuel reduction and CO₂ regulations enforces the use of light-weight materials for structural parts also. The importance of reinforced composites will grow in this area. While the structural behavior and the simulation up to high strain-rate processes for those materials have been in the focus of investigation for many years, nowadays the simulation of high cycle fatigue behavior is getting important as well. Efficient fatigue analysis for metals was developed by understanding the microscopic behavior (crack nucleation and initiation) and bringing it to the macroscopic level by combining it with the matching test data (SN curves, etc.). Similar approaches can be applied to composite materials as well.