Buckling analysis of skew fibre-reinforced composite laminates based on first-order shear deformation plate theory

This paper presents a B-spline Rayleigh-Ritz method (RRM) based on first-order shear deformation plate theory(1,2) (SDPT) for buckling analysis of skew fibre-reinforced composite laminates which are important structural elements in modern engineering structures, particularly in the aerospace industry. The laminates considered may have arbitrary lay-ups, admitting the possibility of coupling between in-plane and out-of-plane behaviour and general anisotropy. Various numerical applications are conducted and the method is proved to be accurate and efficient. It is observed that the effect of through-thickness shear deformation is very large for moderately thick skew laminates and increases with the increase of skew angles. The analysis based on the classical plate theory (CPT) could grossly overestimate critical buckling stresses. As far as the author's knowledge is concerned it seems that there is no paper in the open literature, up to now, dealing with the buckling problems of skew fibre-reinforced composite laminates based on SDPT. Therefore, all the present results are presented in a manner of full convergence studies and it is hoped that they could be useful for designers and researchers who may use them as benchmark values to test the validity and convergence of their numerical techniques and software for similar problems. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.