Effect of ellipse orientation on the thermoelastic behaviour of skew laminated composite plate with elliptical cutout

An effort is made to study the thermoelastic behaviour of a cross-ply laminated composite skew plate with elliptical cutout subjected to pressure and non-linearly varying temperature loading in the present analysis. Orientation of the elliptical cut out is varied from 0° to 180° with respect to horizontal at an interval of 30° in the anti clockwise direction is considered for the present analysis. A three-dimensional heat conduction analysis in fibre reinforced composite laminates has been simulated by finite element method to get realistic temperature in the laminate under different thermal boundary conditions. A finite element method, which works on the basis of three-dimensional theory of elasticity, is employed to evaluate the stresses and deformations. The effect of orientation due to pressure loading on the stresses and transverse deflection is observed to be insignificant. The magnitudes of the in-plane normal stresses, σx and σy, for temperature loading are greatly affected by ellipse orientation and are observed to be minimum at the ellipse orientation of 0° and 90°, respectively. The in-plane and inter-laminar shear stresses are observed to be minimum at the ellipse orientation of 90°.