3-DIMENSIONAL THERMO-STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF MULTIDIRECTIONAL FIBROUS COMPOSITE PLATES

A set of simple thermo-elastic constitutive relations are developed for a general n-directional fibrous composite. A typical multidirectional unit cell is assumed to consist of several unidirectional composite blocks. Transformation-based relationships are used to generate the thermo-elastic properties for the n-directional composite. The present material model is next used to analyse the thermostructural problem employing the finite element method. A quadratic isoparametric brick element is used to discretize both the thermal and structural fields. The material model is validated against an existing ideological model based on the laminate theory. Results reveal the effects of fibre directionality on several thermostructural parameters.