Direct shear stress vs strain relation for fiber reinforced composites

The majority of fiber reinforced composites exhibit strong non-linear behavior in in-plane shear state. The effect is attributed to the micro-cracks appearing in the matrix and can be modeled on the micro and macro level. In this work the author proposes constitutive laws describing the non-linear in-plane shear response, which can be alternative for the relations commonly considered in the literature. The proposed equations are related to the experimental data.