Discussion Vibration behavior of thermally stressed composite skew plate

TLDR: In this article, the authors used the finite element method to investigate the vibration characteristics of thermally stressed/buckled laminated plates in the pre-and postbuckling states.

Abstract: Vibration and stability characteristics of composite laminates under thermo-mechanical loads have attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years as they are being increasingly used in thin walled structural components of aerospace, defense, reactor vessels and other high performance application areas. These studies were reviewed and well documented by Tauchert [1] and Noor and Burton [2]. It is observed from the existing literature that, the static buckling and postbuckling behavior of thermo-mechanically loaded rectangular and circular plates have been studied by many researchers. However, limited work has been done on the dynamic characteristics of thermally stressed/buckled laminated plates. Moreover, similar studies on thermo-mechanical vibration and stability characteristics of laminated composite plates other than rectangular/circular geometry have been sparsely treated in the published literature. Thermal load not only influences the stability characteristics of structures, but also changes its vibration frequencies. The notable recent contributions pertaining to small amplitude vibration behavior of thermally stressed/buckled rectangular composite plates may be found in Refs. [3–8]. Chang and Jen [3] studied influences of temperature change and large amplitude on the period of vibration of orthotropic rectangular plates. Noor and Burton [4] investigated the free vibration behavior of thermally stressed angle-ply composite plates using a three-dimensional thermo-elastic model. Librescu and Lin [5] employed single-term Navier-type double sine function to study the vibration behavior of thermo-mechanically loaded flat and curved composite panels taking into account interlaminar shear traction continuity requirement and considering a higher order shell theory. For accurate solution, the assumed mode shape function in the analytical approach should have more terms, thus leading to more numerical work. Numerical methods, like the finite element method is preferable as there is no need for an a priori assumption of the mode shapes as the solution itself predicts the mode shapes. Lee and Lee [6] used the finite element method to investigate the vibration characteristics of thermally stressed composite plates in the preand postbuckling states. Similar studies on the vibration frequencies of thermally buckled piezolaminated composite plates, and composite plates embedded with shape memory alloy fibers were reported by Oh et al. [7] and Park et al. [8]. Moreover, the authors [6–8] employed