Uncertain Out-of-Plane Behavior of Composite Plates due to Spatially Random Material Properties

Abstract

This paper deals with the evaluation of response variability of composite plates due to randomness in the Poisson’s ratio in particular for the out-of-plane behavior. To this end, we adopt the weighted integral stochastic finite element (SFE) scheme and derive a SFE formulation employing Taylor’s expansion on the random Poisson’s ratio and displacement vector as well. In case of composite plates, the stiffness of the structure is affected by the stacking scheme of individual layers. This means that even the plates subjected only to in-plane loading can show out-of-plane behavior. In order to investigate this phenomenon, we chose two example plates with symmetric and asymmetric stacking scheme. A detailed explanation on the results is addressed for the plates under consideration.