A standard quad-ply approach for designing specially orthotropic laminates with near-zero thermal expansion

This dataset supports the article “A standard quad-ply approach for designing specially orthotropic laminates with near-zero thermal expansion.” It contains an electronic annex and material-specific spreadsheet databases for AS/3501 graphite/epoxy, T300/5208 graphite/epoxy and Kevlar-49 aramid/epoxy. The research hypothesis is that zero or near-zero thermal expansion can be identified systematically for standard laminate families using lamination parameters, closed-form feasibility criteria and discrete stacking-sequence enumeration. The data were generated from classical laminate-theory expressions for specially orthotropic laminates, using published ply-level elastic and thermal properties converted into laminate invariant properties. Candidate standard quad-, tri- and angle-ply stacking sequences were then enumerated, mapped into lamination-parameter space and retained where their calculated thermal-expansion coefficients satisfied the zero or near-zero thermal-expansion criteria used in the article. The spreadsheets list candidate laminates together with ply count, ply percentages, stacking sequence, lamination-parameter coordinates, thermal-expansion coefficients and apparent elastic properties. The data show that near-zero thermal-expansion feasibility is strongly material dependent: AS/3501, T300/5208 and Kevlar-49 provide practical solution sets, while other representative material systems do not necessarily satisfy the same feasibility conditions. The number and distribution of solutions also depend on ply count and subsequence symmetry, with higher ply counts giving denser design-space coverage and non-symmetric or anti-symmetric subsequence forms generally producing more candidates than fully symmetric forms. Each spreadsheet row should be interpreted as an analytically predicted candidate laminate design, not as an experimentally measured specimen. Users can employ the dataset to reproduce the design charts and contour-map interpretations in the article, select stacking sequences for further finite-element or experimental assessment, compare material systems, study ply-count sensitivity, or explore tapered laminate concepts in which neighbouring laminate steps have different thermal-expansion responses. Reuse should account for the assumed ply-level properties and the classical laminate-theory formulation on which the predictions are based.