A review of research and recent trends in analysis of composite plates

Abstract

The use of advance composite materials is increasing in various industrial applications such as renewable energy, transportation, medical devices, etc. As the demand for stability under high mechanical, thermal, electrical and combined loads is increasing, research is being focused on developing newer types of composites and developing analytical and numerical methods to study composite plates as well. The present work is aimed to provide a comprehensive review of research in the structural analysis of composite plates along-with research trends in the last 15 years. The article first presents the evolution of plate theories comparing their formulations, applicability and discusses some key papers, results and conclusions. Evolution of research from the equivalent shear deformation theories (ESL) such as first order theory and higher order theories based on various shape strain functions e.g., polynomial, trigonometric to layer-wise, zigzag and displacement potential theories is presented. The comparative analysis of various solution approaches is done based on a review of research work in the structural analysis of plates. This is followed by review of meshless analysis methods for composite materials highlighting problem domains where conventional finite element analysis (FEA) approach has limitations. This article also presents a discussion on the new methods of plate analysis such as region-by-region modeling, hierarchic modeling and mixed FE and neural network based modeling. An attempt has been done in this article to focus on research trends in the last 15 years.

Analytical solution to the problem about free oscillations of a rigidly clamped circular plate of variable thickness

“…Our analysis of current publications [1,2,[9][10][11][12][13][14][15] leads to the conclusion that solving the problem about bending oscillations of circular plates is in high demand for research-ers and specialists in applied acoustics and mechanics. This judgment is supported by the presence of a huge number of technical applications of circular plates and various ways to solve the relevant eigenvalue problem.…”

“…This judgment is supported by the presence of a huge number of technical applications of circular plates and various ways to solve the relevant eigenvalue problem. However, most of the methods and algorithms considered in [1,2,[9][10][11][12][13][14][15] are specific and focus on iterative numerical approaches. In addition, the results reported in the cited papers typically refer to plates of constant thickness.…”

“…These elements include building floors, foundation slabs, the bottoms of tanks and pistons in the internal combustion engines, as well as aircraft empennage components. Examples of the latest applications include wind turbines [1], turbojet engines, and navigation water vessels [2]. In the latter case, specific plate devices are used to increase the ship's velocity, which control the resistance of the water environment [2].…”

Three-Dimensional Vibration Analysis of Laminated Composite Rectangular Plate with Cutouts

“…Owing to the high specific strength and stiffness, high fatigue resistance, light weight, and good thermal stability compared with conventional heterogeneous materials, applications of composite structures are employed in diverse fields that include vehicles, aircraft, turbines, architecture, submarines, and so on. [ 1 , 2 ]. With the continuous development of composite material manufacturing technology, composite materials have developed into one of the four major material systems in parallel with metal materials, polymer materials, inorganic non-metal materials, and laminated composite plates have become the basic structural components of most engineering structures.…”

Fast assembly of Galerkin matrices for 3D solid laminated composites using finite element and isogeometric discretizations

“…From that vast literature it is easy to realize that a high percentage of the published finite element models correspond to 2D plate and shell models [44,46,67]. The two-dimensional FEM models are primarily founded on two main composite theories: the equivalent single-layer [44,45] and layerwise [15,29,54] approaches. As discussed in the review [46], layerwise based FEM models, that present good compromise between accuracy and computational cost, combine an in-plane 2D FEM discretization with additional degrees of freedom for describing the displacements and/or transverse stresses of all the material layers.…”