Analysis of mixed finite elements for laminated composite plates

The approximation to the solution of a laminated plate problem is considered. The main result consists in proving that a performant scheme can be obtained by simply coupling a standard membrane element for the in-plane displacements with a robust method for plate bending problem. both elements related to the case of homogeneous material. A rigorous convergence analysis is developed fur the case of clamped boundary conditions. Numerical results are presented, showing the accordance between the theoretical results and the actual computations. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.