Cylindrical bending of thick laminated composite plates using scaled boundary finite element method

Abstract

Scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM) is explored in this work to predict the behaviour of thick laminated composite plates undergoing cylindrical bending. A plane strain approach is used to model thick laminated plates as two-dimensional plate theories fails to provide accurate results. Using finite element method (FEM) for the purpose requires several elements through the thickness of each lamina to capture the accurate bending behaviour. However, being a semi-analytical tool, SBFEM has advantage of having only one element along the thickness of each lamina. This reduces the numerical cost of the model many folds compared with traditional FEM and other numerical techniques. Also, the discretisation process in SBFEM is reduced by one spatial dimension as only boundaries are needed to be discretised. Several numerical examples are solved for symmetric as well as anti-symmetric lamination sequences and compared with best practise theories as well as with exact solutions, where available. It is demonstrated that the presented formulation using SBFEM is able to predict the cylindrical bending behaviour of thick laminated composite plates very accurately while reducing the computational cost.