Hypar shells are industrially preferred and failure aspects of laminated composites need attention for confident use of these structural units as roofing elements. So an eight noded isoparametric finite element is used in this article to study failure progress of laminated composite skewed hypar shell roofs, which is validated through a solution of benchmark problem. First ply and ultimate ply failure loads of the hypar shells are reported in the present article. The first ply failure load is considered at which the failure is initiated within the laminated shell and the ultimate ply failure occurs when the shell ceases to carry any further load due to material incapacity. While obtaining the failure loads, the shell is considered to be under plane stress condition and no transverse stresses are considered to act on any lamina.

Keywords: Skewed hypar shell, Laminated composite, First ply, Progressive ply failure.