Static analysis of thick rectangular laminated plates: three-dimensional elasticity solutions via differential quadrature element method

Abstract

This article presents the first endeavor to develop the differential quadrature element method for static solution of three-dimensional elasticity equations of thick rectangular laminated composite plates. The domain decomposition technique is employed to decompose a laminated plate into elements according to material layers. The differential quadrature (DQ) method is then applied to each element where the material properties are continuous to form the element weighting coefficient matrix and element force vector. The discretized element weighting coefficient matrices and element force vectors are assembled together to form the global weighting coefficient matrix and global force vector for the whole plate using connection conditions. The solution for the entire plate is obtained by solving the final algebraic equation system. Detailed formulations and numerical procedures are presented and the convergence characteristics of the method are investigated. The numerical results are then compared, where possible, with the analytical solutions to verify the present solutions. Consequently, some new numerical results are computed and analyzed using the present numerical method for laminated rectangular plates with different boundary conditions, which are not solvable directly by the global DQ method.