Study on the Unsteady Creep of Composite Beams with an Irregular Laminar Fibrous Structure Made from Nonlinear Hereditary Materials

Abstract

The creep of homogenous and hybrid composite beams of an irregular laminar fibrous structure is investigated. The beams consist of thin walls and flanges (load-carrying layers). The walls may be reinforced longitudinally or crosswise in the plane, and the load-carrying layers are reinforced in the longitudinal direction. The mechanical behavior of phase materials is described by the Rabotnov nonlinear hereditary theory of creep taking into account their possible different resistance to tension and compression. On the basis of hypotheses of the Timoshenko theory, with using the method of time steps, a problem is formulated for the inelastic bending deformation of such beams with account of the weakened resistance of their walls to the transverse shear. It is shown that, at discrete instants of time, the mechanical behavior of such structures can formally be described by the governing relations for composite beams made of nonlinear elastic anisotropic materials with a known initial stress state. The method of successive iterations, similar to the method of variable parameters of elasticity, is used to linearize the boundary-value problem at each instant of time. The bending deformation is investigated for homogeneous and reinforced cantilever and simply supported beams in creep under the action of a uniformly distributed transverse load. The cross sections of the beams considered are I-shaped. It is found that the use of the classical theory for such beams leads to the prediction of indefensibly underestimated flexibility, especially in long-term loading. It is shown that, in beams with reinforced load-carrying layers, the creep mainly develops due to the shear strains of walls. It is found that, in short- and long-term loadings of composite beams, the reinforcement structures rational by the criterion of minimum flexibility are different.