A new method is proposed for effective analysis of laminated plates incorporating accurate through-thethickness distribution of displacements, strains and stresses in the finite element formulation. It is a two-step analysis procedure. In the first step, displacements are obtained using a post-processing procedure based on the three-dimensional stress equilibrium equations and the thermoelasticity equations, from the results of FSDT finite element analysis. In the second step, the higher-order through-the-thickness distribution of displacements are reflected on the subsequent finite element analysis. The effectiveness of the present approach for the analysis of laminated plates is shown by numerical examples.
IntroductionNumerous approaches have been proposed for studying the through-the-thickness behavior of laminated composite and sandwich plates. These approaches include those using (1) finite element analysis based on three-dimensional continuum mechanics, (2) finite element analysis based on quasi-three-dimensional models or higher-order twodimensional models and (3) finite element analysis based on two-dimensional or shell models based on classical laminate plate theory (CLPT) or first order shear deformation theory (FSDT) combined with post-processing procedures. Description of the various computational approaches can be found in several survey papers (Kapania, Three-dimensional or quasi-three-dimensional finite element analysis can become computationally expensive for problems with complicated geometry, especially for laminates with large number of layers.Finite element analysis based on two-dimensional finite element models or shell models based on first order shear deformation theory has limited accuracy as the thickness increases or for sandwich plates. Particularly, accurate evaluation of transverse stresses cannot be expected. Twodimensional finite element analysis used in conjunction with post-processing procedures based on the integration of the three-dimensional stress equilibrium equations or predictor-corrector procedures based on the threedimensional stress equilibrium equations and the threedimensional thermoelasticity equations have been proposed (Engblom and Ochoa, 1985;Chaudhuri, 1986;Noor et al., , 1994 Kim, 1999, 2000). Also proposed are the methods based on obtaining transverse shear stresses directly from transverse shear forces, reducing the required order of derivatives of interpolation functions in the stress equilibrium type post-processing methods for the evaluation of transverse normal stress (Rolfes and Rohwer, 1997; Rolfes et al., 1998a, b). The proposed approaches could enhance the accuracy of the through-the-thickness responses considerably. However, even for the most advanced post-processing techniques, the final accuracy of the results are bounded by the limitation of the initial finite element results which are based on a simplified model. This is more true especially for the transverse normal stress in thermally loaded laminates. To overcome the restraint of the initial an...