Hi,

Yes you can use it with the appropriate damage creterion

There are two types of damages. For capturing Inter laminar damages, Continuum shells are preferred over Conventional shells. You just model the continuum shell plies and put in Cohesive layers between them. You can use Cohesive Zzone theory here.

For Intra Laminar damage such as matrix failure, Fibre failure, both continuum as well as conventional shells are good. You can use Hashin Damage Initiation Criterion here.

For capturing damages caused by impact, both continuum and conventional are good but continuum is preferred.