Cylindrical bending of multilayered composite laminates and sandwiches

Abstract

In a whole variety of higher order plate theories existing in the literature no consideration is given to the transverse normal strain / deformation effects on flexural response when these higher order theories are applied to shear flexible composite plates in view of minimizing the number of unknown variables. The objective of this study is to carry out cylindrical bending of simply supported laminated composite and sandwich plates using sinusoidal shear and normal deformation plate theory. The most important feature of the present theory is that it includes the effects of transverse normal strain/deformation. The displacement field of the presented theory is built upon classical plate theory and uses sine and cosine functions in terms of thickness coordinate to include the effects of shear deformation and transverse normal strain. The theory accounts for realistic variation of the transverse shear stress through the thickness and satisfies the shear stress free conditions at the top and bottom surfaces of the plate without using the problem dependent shear correction factor. Governing equations and boundary conditions of the theory are obtained using the principle of minimum potential energy. The accuracy of the proposed theory is examined for several configurations of laminates under various static loadings. Some problems are presented for the first time in this paper which can become the base for future research. For the comparison purpose, the numerical results are also generated by using higher order shear deformation theory of Reddy, first-order shear deformation plate theory of Mindlin and classical plate theory. The numerical results show that the present theory provides displacements and stresses very accurately as compared to those obtained by using other theories.