Dynamic Buckling of Composite Laminates Using a Higher Order Theory A. Chattopadhyay, A.G. Radu, D. Dragomir-Daescu ‘Arizona State University ‘Tempe, AZ 85287, USA Summary A higher order shear deformation theory (HOT) is used to investigate the instability associated with composite plates subject to dynamic loads. Both transverse shear and rotary inertia effects are taken into account. The procedure is implemented using the finite element approach. The natural frequencies and the critical buckling load are computed and are compared with results based on the classical laminate plate theory (CLPT) and the first order shear deformation theory (FSDT). The results of the developed approach are also compared with those obtained using NASTRAN for an isotropic material. The first two instability regions are determined for various loading conditions. Introduction Composites are increasingly being used in the design of load-carrying members for aerospace applications. As a result, a large amount of research has been devoted to study the static and dynamic responses of composites under a variety of loading conditions. In studying the behavior of these structures sunder static and dynamic buckling loads, the classical and first order plate theories, have been shown to under predict the deflections and to over predict the buckling loads and the natural frequencies (1-3). The higher order theories, which more accurately model transverse shear effects, have been shown to predict better results (3-6 A variationally consistent higher order theory [7] is used to investigate the dynamic buckling of composite plates in the current study. This theory assumes a cubic distribution for the in-plane displacements through the thickness and satisfies the stress free boundary conditions at the top and bottom surfaces of the laminate, Composite plates with various geometry and boundary conditions are analysed. Problem Formulation ‘A composite plate with the coordinate plane (x,y) as the middle plane and the z-axis along the thickness direction is considered. The displacements of an arbitrary point within the plate, denoted u, v and ware expressed as follows 8 vote St) Se a ax) 3b , cows aB Ear wl =) 3h where, the rotations 0: and B and the midplane displacements up, Vo, and wo are time dependent functions of coordinates x and y, and h is the laminate thickness. The Von-Karman strain-displacement relations are used for modeling moderate displacements and small rotations that characterize the deformed state. The total strain, €, can be expressed in the matrix form as follows ofs}iheh thet = « 19 e+ ey @where € and ey are the midplane and the nonlinear strains, respectively, and €w represents their sum, Quantities e, and es are the bending strains corresponding to the linear and cubic variation in 2, & is the midplane shear strain and €,2 is the shear strain corresponding to the quadratic variation in z, They are expressed as follows Ove) ox aa, OB 3) ‘The stress resultant is defined as 6" ={N'M™ P™Q™ RT}, where N, M and Q are the in-plane force resultants vectors and P and R denote the higher order stress resultants vectors. The constitutive relation can be written as 6 =C e where the strain vector is e* = {e,,"e,"€," €," €,." } and C is the stiffness matrix. * (ST -BU +8W)dt=0, where T, U and W are the kinetic energy, the strain energy and the work done by the external loads respectively. Using Eq. (3), the strain energy variation is expanded in the following form ‘The equation of motion is derived using Hamilton's Principle, 8[] BU = [bet A ey + 6e%,Be, +5el,Ee, +be)Be,, + de) De, +5e7Fe, |d2 £,,]40 Md + jhbefEe,, +6e%Fe, + bese, + Se7A,e, +e!D,e,, +5€3,D,e, + 5m In Eq. (4) the components A and A, are the extensional stiffness matrices, B and B, are the bending- extensional coupling matrices and D and D, are the bending stiffness matrices [14]. The subscript s denotes shear effects Aer integration by pats with respect to time, the kinetic energy variation is expressed in terms of the displacement vector (d}" = (u, v, w) and its second derivative with respect to time (Eq, 5). The variation of the work done by the dynamic buckling force F, is written as follows [9] 2 sr=-fp{aa"}d Ja and ow=4fn(%)an © Finite Element Formulation For obtaining the governing equation of the plate, the strains in Eq. (4), the second order time derivative and the partial derivative of the transverse displacement from Eq, (5) are expressed in terms of the vector of the unknown functions u = {u, a, v, B, w} following the procedure of Ref. [10] and [11]. The unknown functions vector U is expressed in terms of the nodal unknowns q using bilinear interpolation for u, . v and B and sixteen term cubic interpolation for w. The finite clement analysis is performed using a 620quadrilateral element with four nodes and eight degrees of freedom per node. The governing equation of the plate is obtained in the matrix form as follows M@+[K, +Ky, +Kyla+h, Koa=0 6 where M is the mass matrix, Ky is the linear stiffness matrix, Kyu and Kuw are the nonlinear stiffness matrices and Ka is the geomettic stiffness matrix. These stiffness matrices arc obtained by regrouping the terms in Eq, (4). In the present study only linear buckling analysis is performed, therefore the nonlinear stiffness matrices in Eq. (6) are not considered. The geometric stiffness matrix, Ke, is computed following Ref. [12], by assembling for the entire plate the following clemental matrix N,N ‘ NOON Ki = JG! TGQ, wih G, lo ax,) ana | a Hl a In Eq, (7), AH, denotes matrix of the derivatives of the cubic shape functions with respect to x and y coordinates and the summation symbol indicates horizontal augmentation of the four nodal matrices. Stability Analysis ‘The stability analysis of the plate is performed by expressing the dynamic buckling load F, in terms of the critical buckling load, Pz, as follows F,=a,P, +0,P, cos8t @) where og and cy are the static and dynamic parameters taking values from 0 to 1. After substitution of the buckling load, Eq, (8), in Eq. (6), the governing equation of the plate is written as follows Ma+[K, +08, Ke }q+(4P,,cos0t)K, q=0 o Equation (9) is a Mathieu type equation, describing the nonlinear instability behavior of the plate subjected to a periodic in-plane load. The generalized eigenvalue problem obtained from Eq. (9) is solved by neglecting both terms containing Ps, to obtain the natural frequencies and the mode shapes of the plate. If the harmonic and the mass terms are neglected, the new generalized cigenvalue problem yields the critical buckling load, The instability regions are determined from the boundaries of instability which represent the periodic solutions of Eq. (9) [12]. These solutions are ght (a, sin(i01/2)+b, cos(i6t/2)) and q= 35(a, sin(i8e/2)+ b,cos(iar/2) ) ao) Substituting solutions (10) into Eq. (9) and by grouping the sine and cosine terms, two sets of linear algebraic equations in a; and b; are obtained for each solution. To obtain nontrivial coefficient vectors a, and b,, the determinant of the coefficient matrix has to be zero for each of the four sets. These determinants are infinite since the series in solution (10) is infinite and belong to a class of converging determinants called normal determinants. Considering only the first term in the series solutions (10), the obtained determinants are presented in Eqs. (11) which represent generalized eigenvalue problems whose solutions determine the instability regions. Equations (1-a) determine the first (principal) region of dynamic instability, Eq, (11-b) determines the upper boundary of the second instability region and represents the natural frequency of the plate loaded with GaP, and Eq, (11-c) provides the lower boundary of the second instability region, 621K +(0)-a,/20,Kg FM. com OAKe K+od.Ko } [0 M an) payers (4: /20aKo IH ° I [K+aA,K To validate the analysis, comparisons are made using an AISI 4340 steel plate having the same dimensions as the thick composite plate, L/h = 12.5, with both ends fixed. The critical buckling and the first three natural frequencies are compared with the ones predicted by NASTRAN. The results are presented in Fig. | and 2 and very good agreement is observed. ™ ty 915.68 930.89 | i 1 2 3 Figure | Critical buckling load for Figure 2 The first three natural frequencies for AIST 4340 steel AIST 4340 Steel Next, numerical results are presented for Graphite/Epoxy rectangular plates with symmetric cross-ply arrangements, The laminates are made out of 8 identical plies with material properties: E, = 1.344 10° MPa Ez = Ey = 1.034 10* MPa, G,2 = G,3 = 4.999 10° MPa Gz; = 1.999 10° MPa; V2 = Vis = Vay = 0.33. The plate has length L = 127 mm and width b= 12.7 mm. Two different plate thickness h = 1.016 mm and h = 10.16 mm resulting in two cases L/h = 125 and L/h = 12.5 are analyzed, ‘Two types of boundary conditions are studied (Fig. 3), Case 1: edge A fixed and edges B, C and D free and Case 2: edges A and C fixed and edges B and D free. The load is applied on edge C in both cases. ‘The first natural frequency and the critical buckling load are computed for each combination of boundary conditions and thickness using CLPT, FSDT and HOT. The obtained results are also compared with experimental results of natural frequencies for the thin plate (Lh = 125) and Case | type boundary conditions [14]. These results summarized in Table 1, indicate that the CLPT and the FSDT slightly over predict the natural frequency while HOT results are closer to the experimental value. For both types of boundary conditions, the CLPT and the FSDT over predict the natural frequencies and the critical buckling load compared to the HOT. These deviations are more significant for thicker plates (L/h =12.5). For example, in Case I the CLPT over predicts oy by 3.96 % and in Case 2 by 20.04 % while FSDT over predictions are 0.74 % for Case | and 4.45 % for Case 2. For the same thickness ratio (L/h = 12.5) the Pa. is over predicted by CLPT by 6.37 % in Case 1 and by 71.91 % in Case 2 while FSDT over predicts Par by 2.65 % for Case | and by 8.84 % in Case 2. The deviations increase with plate thickness due to increased transverse shear effects. 22Table 1 Case Uh CLPT. FSDT Experiment (14) HOT oy (Hz) [Pa IN] | o, (Hz) | Pa (ND oy [Hz] © (Hz) | Pa IN] 1 125 {82.153 | 16.344 | 82.126 | 16.338 79.833 82.119 | 16.336 2 522.852 | 261.623 | 521.151 | 260.116 520.722 [259.737 1 125 [820.52 _| 16344.1 | 795.098 | 1572.7 789.224 | 153643, 2 4664.44 | 261623 | 4058.67 | 165644 = 3885.57 | 152179) The variation of the natural frequency (1a) of the plate loaded with agPe is presented in Fig. 4 for Case 2 and L/h = 12.5. The results obtained with the HOT are compared with those obtained using CLPT and FSDT. Once again it is observed that these theories over predict the frequencies. B A au T 70 tiao nana bossa cians aso ss L + ot sate Bucrg Loan Sor Figure 3 The geometry of the plate Figure 4 The variation of the natural frequency with the static load ut og : u ie ; s fa 800 static parameter 06 ©] 2686 sate parameter 08 200 static parameter 02 008 static parameter 0.4 Fig. 5 Instability regions, Case 1, Lh = 12.5 Fig. 6 Instability regions, Case 2, L/h = 125 The instability regions are obtained (Figs. 5 and 6) by plotting the parametric ratio 6/2. resulting from Eqs. (11) with respect to the dynamic parameter cy for imposed values of the static parameter Gp. AS seen from these figures, in which U and S denote unstable and stable behavior, the width of the instability regions increase with increase in static and dynamic loads. 623,Concluding Remarks A higher order plate theory based finite element model has been developed for studying the parametric instability of composite plates. The theory assumes through the thickness cubic variations for in- plane displacements and satisfies the stress free boundary conditions. Numerical results are presented for {(0/90)a}: Graphite/Epoxy composite plate with two different boundary conditions and plate thickness. The following observations are made: 1. The natural frequencies and the critical buckling load determined from the current study for isotropic plates are in good agreement with the ones obtained using NASTRAN. The natural frequencies obtained for composite plates are the closest to available experimental data. 2. Both the classical and the first order theories over predict the natural frequencies and the critical buckling load for both types of boundary conditions studied. The deviations increase with plate thickness due to increased transverse shear effects. 3. The width of the instability regions increases with increase of both, static and dynamic loads, as expected. Acknowledgements ‘The support of the present research by U.S. Army Research Office, Grant # DAAHO4 -94-G-0157, Technical Monitor, Dr. Gary Anderson is acknowledged. The authors are also thankful to Dr. Haozhong Gu, Arizona State University, for his valuable comments during the research. References 1. Bert, C.W. (1987), “ Dynamic Instability of Shear Deformable Antisymmetric Angle-Ply Laminates”, International Journal of ‘Structures, Vol. 23, pp. 1053-1061. 2. Srinivasan, RS. and Chelepandi, P. (1986), “Dynamic Stability of Rectangular Laminated Composite Plates", Computers and Structures, Vol. 24, pp. 233-238, 3. Balamurugan, M., Ganapathi, M. and Varadan, T.K. (1996), “Nonlinear Dynamic Instability of Laminated Composite Plates Using Finite Element Method”, Computers and Siructures, Vol. 60, pp. 125 - 130. 4, Reddy, J.N. and Phan, N.D. (1985), “Stability and Vibration of Isotropic, Orthotropic and Laminated Plates According to a Higher-Order Shear Deformation Theory”, Journal of Sound and Vibration, Vol. 98, pp. 157-170. 3. Librescu, L. and Khdeir, A.A. (1988), “Analysis of Symmetric Cross-ply Laminated Elastic Plates Using a Higher-order Theory: Part I ~ Buckling and Free Vibration”, Composite Structures, Vol. 9, pp. 259-277 6. Chattopadhyay, A and Gu, H. (1996), “Exact Elasticity Solution for Buckling of Composite Laminates", Composite Structures, Vol. 34, pp. 291-299. 7, Reddy, J.N. (1984), “A Simple Higher-Order Theory for Laminated Composite Plates”, Journal of Applied Mechanics, Vol. 51, pp. 745-752. Reddy, J.N. (1997), Mechanics of Laminated Composite Plates, CRC Press. 1. Timoshenko, S.P. and Gere, J.M. (1961), Theory of Elastic Stability, McGraw-Hill. 10. Pica, A., Wood, R.D. and Hinton, E. (1980), “Finite Element Analysis of Geometrically Nonlinear Plate Behavior using a Mindlin Formulation”, Computers and Structures, Vol. 11, pp. 203-215. LL. Zienkiewicz, O.C, and Taylor, RL. (1991), The Finite Element Method, McGraw-Hill. 12, Bolotin, V.V. (1964), The Dynamic Stability of Elastic Systems, Holen-Day, Inc. 13. Shen, M.-H. H. and Grady J.E. (1992), “Free Vibrations of Delaminated Beams”, ALAA Jounal. Vol. 60, pp. 1361-1370. 624