Bending and vibration of composite laminated plates

Hybrid-stress finite element method is applied for analysis of bending and vibration of composite laminated plates in this paper. Firstly, based on the modified complementary principle, a rectangular hybrid-stress plate bending element is presented which applies to analysis of laminates. Inside the element, different stress parameters are assumed according to different layers. The boundary displacements are determined by means of the assumption of YNS theory on the boundary of elements. The element formed in this way not only can take effects of transverse shear deformation and local warping into account, but also has less degrees of freedom. Then, problems of bending and vibration of laminates are solved by using this element, and the numerical results are compared with the exact solutions. This shows that the results obtained in the paper are very close to the exact results.