Analysis for the interlaminar stresses of thin layered composites subjected to thermal loads

Abstract

Accurate stress analysis of layered material systems that are sometimes very thin is of great importance in the assessment of their structural integrity and performance. To give satisfactory results, the discretised meshes of the conventional domain solution techniques, such as the finite element method, must have reasonable aspect ratios in the same order of magnitude. Therefore, the domain modeling of ultra-thin structures, such as the facings of sandwich composites and adhesive layers, shall require an enormous amount of discretised meshes that may incur overloading computations. Using the boundary element method as an alternative, the present work proposes an effective approach to analyze the interlaminar stresses of thin layered composites subjected to general thermal loads. The transformed boundary integral equation for anisotropic thermoelasticity is fully regularized using the technique of integration by parts and analytical integration. At the end, the veracity and applicability of the proposed scheme are demonstrated by numerical examples.