Accurate Prediction of Thermomechanical Stress Field in the Laminated Composite Plates

Abstract

Thermomechanical stress fields in composite plates are obtained using an efficient global–local theory. All components of the stress field have been computed by direct use of the constitutive equations, not from the use of post-processing techniques. It has been possible to get accurate computations due to the double superposition-based displacement field assumption and a priori satisfaction of the boundary conditions on the displacements and stresses at all interfaces as well as the outer surfaces. Across-the-thickness nonlinearity in the distribution of the transverse displacement component has been effected by using a sub-layerwise piecewise linear function for the temperature field. The theory incurs constant computational expenses for all types of composite laminated plate structures, since the plate-governing equations contain only the reference layer variables. By comparing with the 3D exact solutions of thermoelasticity, displacements and stresses calculated by the present theory have been found to be very accurate. They have been seen to be superior to other shear deformation theories. Effects of the aspect ratio and length-to-width ratio under thermomechanical loads have been investigated.