BENDING, BUCKLING, AND VIBRATION OF LAMINATED PLATES

Laminated plates are one of the simplest and most widespread practical applications of composite laminates. Laminated beams are, of course, simpler. However, such essentially one-dimensional structural elements do not display well the unique two-dimensional capabilities and characteristics of composite laminates. 

A simply supported rectangular plate is used consistently in all sections to illustrate the kinds of results that can be obtained, i.e., the influence of the various stiffnesses on laminated plate behavior. In addition, only the simplest types of loading will be studied in order to avoid the solution difficulties inherent to complex loadings. Accordingly, in the interest of simplicity, just the bare thread of laminated plate results will be displayed. 

Specially orthotropic plates, i.e., plates with multiple specially orthotropic layers that are symmetric about the plate middle surface have, as has already been noted in Section 4.3, force and moment resultants in which there is no bending-extension coupling nor any shear-extension or bend-twist coupling, that is, 

For plate problems, whether the specially orthotropic laminate has a single layer or multiple layers is essentially immaterial the laminate need only be characterized by 0 2, D22. and Dgg in Equation (5.2). That is, because there is no bending-extension coupling, the force-strain relations, Equation (5.1), are not used in plate analysis for transverse loading causing only bending. However, note that force-strain relations are needed in shell analysis because of the differences between deformation characteristics of plates as opposed to shells. 

because specially orthotropic laminates are virtually as easy to analyze as isotropic plates, other laminates are regarded as, or approximated with, specially orthotropic laminates. This approximation will be studied by comparison of results for each type of laminate with and without the various stiffnesses that distinguish it from a specially orthotropic laminate. Specifically, the importance of the bend-twist coupling terms D,g and D26 will be examined for symmetric angle-ply laminates. Then, bending-extension coupling will be analj ed for antisym- 

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Classical solutions to laminated shell buckling and vibration problems in the manner of Chapter 5 were obtained by Jones and Morgan [6-47]. Their results are presented as normalized buckling loads or fundamental natural frequency versus the Batdorf shell curvature parameter. They showed that, for antisymmetrically laminated cross-ply shells as for plates, the effect of coupling between bending and extension on buckling loads and vibration frequencies dies out rapidly as the number of layers... 

The free vibration frequencies and mode shapes will be determined for plates with various laminations specially orthotropic, symmetric angle-ply, antisymmetric cross-ply, and antisymmetric angle-ply. The results for the different types of lamination will be compared to determine the influence of bend-twist coupling and bending-extension coupling on the vibration behavior. As with the deflection problems in Section 5.3 and the buckling problems in Section 5.4, different simply supported edge boundary conditions will be used in the several problems presented. 

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