This paper outlines an experimental investigation carried out for the analysis of failure mechanisms in fibrous laminated composite plates containing stress raisers, in the form of cutouts, under static biaxial planar compressive loadiing. A specially designed biaxial loadiing frame was used to test a series of 48 ply graphite/epoxy composite laminated plates with centrally located circular hol...

An experimental study of the stress distribution around holes in orthotropic composite laminates has been conducted using thermoelastic stress analysis (TSA). Quantitative thermoelastic studies of stress concentrations in metallic plates is a straightforward matter, all that is required is the ratio of the response from the hole and a far-field reading. For orthotropic materials the situation i...

A new elegant, powerful and accurate superposition method is presented for isotropic/specially orthotropic rectangular plates with arbitrary transverse load and arbitrary combination of free/simply-supported/clamped/guided/elastically supported edges. All the component solutions used here are infinite series equivalents of the complicated closed-form Levy-type solutions employed in the conventi...

We use the first-order shear deformation theory and a meshless method based on radial basis functions in a pseudospectral framework for predicting the free vibration behavior of thick orthotropic, monoclinic and hexagonal plates. The shape parameter is obtained by an optimization procedure. The three translational and two rotational degrees of freedom of a point of the laminate are independentl...

A parametric study of the buckling behavior of infinitely long symmetrically laminated anisotropic plates that are subjected to linearly varying edge loads, uniform shear loads, or combinations of these loads is presented. The study focuses on the effects of the shape of linearly varying edge load distribution, plate orthotropy, and plate flexural anisotropy on plate buckling behavior. In addit...