In this paper, the nonlinear free vibrations of thin symmetric and non-symmetric cross-ply composite plates subjected to biaxial initial stresses are investigated. Because of their excellent properties such as specific strength and specific stiffness, composite plates have wide applications in aerospace and mechanical structures. Based on Von-Karman's strain-displacement relations and using Gal...

Embedding FBG strain sensors within a GFRP sandwich composite material allows early detection of internal defects. However, the sensors need to survive the manufacturing process to provide this capability. Vacuum infusion is commonly used to manufacture GFRP sandwich composite materials but, it needs to be modified to accommodate the embedding process. A stage by stage procedure is demonstrated...

It has been documented that AE signals propagate in thin plates as extensional and flexural plate modes. This was demonstrated using simulated AE sources (pencil lead breaks) by Gorman [1] on thin aluminum and gr/ep composite plates and by Gorman and Prosser [2] on thin aluminum plates. A typical signal from a pencil lead break source which identifies these two modes is shown in Figure 1. AE si...

The aim of this work is to evaluate the influence of fabrication methods on the com-pressive properties of sandwich composites using both experimental work and numerical simulations. Two types of sandwich composites with E-glass/Kevlar/polyester resin facings and End-grain balsa wood as core have been produced by vacuum infusion processing (VIP) and hand-lay up (HL) method. Compression tests on...

Punching experiments on wide honeycomb sandwich beams were performed to evaluate the predictive capabilities of a newly developed constitutive model in structural applications. The employed constitutive model for plastically com-pressible orthotropic materials accounts for both non-uniform hardening and softening associated with stressing in different directions. This feature is vital when asse...

Thermal buckling loads of laminated composite plates are maximized for a given total thickness. Fiber directions and relative thickness of layers are considered as design variables. Analysis of buckling temperature is carried out by using the finite element method, while the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) is employed to optimize as many as seven variables for the different layered plat...