Stress in elastic plates reinforced by fibres lying in concentric circles

We Consider fibre-reinforced elastic plates with the reinforcement continuously distributed in concentric circles ; such a material is locally transversely isotropic, with the circumferential direction as the preferred direction. For an annulus bounded by concentric circles, the exact solution of the traction boundary value problem is obtained. When the extension modulus in the fibre direction is large compared to other extension and shear moduli, the material is strongly anisotropic. For this case a simpler approximate solution is obtained by treating the material as inextensible in the fibre direction. It is shown that the exact solution reduces to the inextensible solution in the appropriate limit. The inextensible theory predicts the occurrence of stress concentration layers in which the direct stress is infinite ; for materials with small but finite extensibility these layers correspond to thin regions of high stress and high stress gradient. A boundary layer theory is developed for these regions. For a typical carbon fibre-resin composite, the combined boundary layer and inextensible solutions give an excellent approximation to the exact solution. The theory is applied to the problem of an isotropic plate, under uniform stress at infinity, containing a circular hole which is strengthened by the addition of an annulus of fibre-reinforced material.