A general quadrilateral multilayered plate element with continuous interlaminar stresses

Abstract

The purpose of this work is the formulation of a general quadrilateral multilayered anisotropic plate element. The plate element is formulated on the basis of a refined third-order shear deformation plate theory recently proposed by the author. The plate model makes use of a displacement field that fulfils a priori the geometric and stress continuity conditions at the interfaces between the layers, and requires only five generalized displacements to describe the kinematics of the laminate deformation. To test the performance of the developed plate element, both closed-form and finite element-based solutions are given and compared with results from three-dimensional elasticity and other approximate two-dimensional plate models.