Analysis of Corner Supported Arbitrary Laminated Composite Plates

In the past few decades, plates made of laminated composite materials have attracted the attention of many engineers and designers due to their favorable properties of high strength to weight ratio and stiffness. The behavior of thin laminated plates having a general stacking sequence is governed by three coupled partial differential equations, derived based on the “Kirchhoff plate theory”. Analytical solutions of these equations have been obtained for cases involving simple geometries and boundary conditions. One of the important and practical boundary conditions which is not fully addressed yet is the corner supported plate. The purpose of this study is to propose a Ritz method-based approach for obtaining an accurate solution for a uniformly loaded corner supported thin laminated composite plate having a general stacking sequence. In the proposed approach, Ritz method is cast in a matrix form and an automated symbolic integration procedure is used to allow the use of as many approximating polynomial terms as required for convergence. The accuracy of the proposed method is validated by comparing the obtained results against those of finite element method solutions generated using the commercial software ABAQUS.