Buckling Analysis of Composite Laminates with Through-The-Width Delamination Using a Novel Layerwise Theory

In this paper, a novel layerwise theory based on FSDT has been proposed to estimate the buckling load of composite plates having through the width delaminations. The Rayleigh-Ritz Method has been adopted and displacement fields are obtained by incorporating simple polynomial series resulting in much less computational cost. Besides, contact constraints are imposed to the delaminated area using Penalty method in order to prevent unacceptable penetration. The present layerwise theory provides a more realistic description of the kinematics of composite laminates when compared to ESL theories. It is also capable of predicting buckling response of thick delaminated composite plates as well as handling both local buckling of the delaminated sublaminate and global buckling of the whole plate. Moreover, the 3D FEM analysis is performed using ANSYS5.4 commercial software. The results show a good agreement with those obtained by the analytical Model.