This paper proposes a higher-order shear deformation theory to predict the bending response of the laminated composite and sandwich plates with general lamination configurations.The proposed theory a priori satisfies the continuity conditions of transverse shear stresses at interfaces.Moreover,the number of unknown variables is independent of the number of layers.The first derivatives of transverse displacements have been taken out from the inplane displacement fields,so that the C 0 shape functions are only required during its finite element implementation.Due to C 0 continuity requirements,the proposed model can be conveniently extended for implementation in commercial finite element codes.To verify the proposed theory,the fournode C 0 quadrilateral element is employed for the interpolation of all the displacement parameters defined at each nodal point on the composite plate.Numerical results show that following the proposed theory,simple C 0 finite elements could accurately predict the interlaminar stresses of laminated composite and sandwich plates directly from a constitutive equation,which has caused difficulty for the other global higher order theories.
In this paper,a 13-node pyramid spline element is derived by using the tetrahedron volume coordinates and the B-net method,which achieves the second order completeness in Cartesian coordinates.Some appropriate examples were employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed element.The numerical results show that the spline element has much better performance compared with the isoparametric serendipity element Q20 and its degenerate pyramid element P13 especially when mesh is distorted,and it is comparable to the Lagrange element Q27.It has been demonstrated that the spline finite element method is an efficient tool for developing high accuracy elements.
