Thermoelastic Stability Behavior of Curvilinear Fiber‐Reinforced Composite Laminates With Different Boundary Conditions

Abstract

In this article, the thermoelastic stability behavior of curvilinear fiber‐reinforced composite laminates is investigated using a shear flexible plate theory. The laminate is composed of layers that make use of curvilinear fibers to create spatial variation of stiffness due to the continuous change of fiber orientation within the lamina. Such composite laminates, subjected to different thermal loads like uniform and non‐uniform temperature distributions, are considered in this analysis. The governing equations obtained using the principle of minimization of total potential energy, are solved for evaluating the critical buckling temperature. The displacement fields of pre‐buckling of the laminate are evaluated before proceeding for the thermal buckling analysis. The formulation is checked against available solutions in the literature. A detailed parametric study considering important design parameters such as curvilinear fiber angles, lay‐up, thickness ratio, coefficients of thermal expansion, and modular ratio on the thermoelastic stability/buckling behavior of composite laminates is made. The present analysis highlights the substantial change in the critical buckling loads due to the curvilinear fiber angles, lay‐up and boundary conditions. The new results presented here for curvilinear fiber‐reinforced composite laminate with clamped/mixed boundary conditions may be useful in assessing similar studies based on higher‐order theories or other numerical studies. POLYM. COMPOS., 40:2876–2890, 2019. © 2018 Society of Plastics Engineers

Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Composites: Manufacturing, Properties, and Applications

“…Sheet-molded composites (SMCs) are fabricated by bonding homogeneous layers of materials using a compression molding process to form nonhomogeneous composite laminates. The laminate is composed of layers and, in the case of FRP composites made of fiber sheets, buckling stability of the material improves with increasing the number of layers in the laminate [110]. SMC shows the application in large structural components like automotive body parts consisting of high strength to weight ratio [111,112,113].…”

“…Stress concentration factor (SCF) plays an important role while considering the failure prediction, without consideration of SCFs transverse strength will be overestimated [124]. Thermal buckling load for curvilinear fiber-reinforced composite laminates is more for antisymmetric laminates, while laminates with nonuniform temperature distribution exhibit high critical load carrying capacity [110].…”

Research on low‐velocity impact resistance of carbon fiber composite laminates

“…Researchers have conducted numerous experiments and numerical simulations to determine carbon fiber composites' mechanical response and damage behavior under LVI over the past several decades. In these studies, external factors such as the shape of the impactor, 11,12 mass, [13][14][15] inclination angle, 16 number of impacts, 17,18 location, 19,20 angle of impact, 21 temperature and humidity, 22,23 and boundary conditions [24][25][26] were discussed. Internal factors including laminate thickness, 27 fabric architecture, 28,29 type of fiber, [30][31][32] matrix, 33 loads, 34 stacking sequence, 35,36 interfaces, 37,38 and content of nanoclay particles 39,40 were also examined.…”