Abstract: Materials
are put to serious test when they are subjected to elevated temperatures.
Estimation of thermal stresses and deformations of fibre reinforced composite
plates is more complex owing to material anisotropy. Hence an effort is made to
study the thermo elastic behaviour of a cross-ply laminated composite skew
plate with elliptical cutout subjected to non-linearly varying temperature
loading has been investigated in the present analysis. Major axis of the ellipse
collinear with the shorter diagonal has been taken 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 results
obtained by varying the skew angle and size of the cutout are discussed. The
magnitude of the major in-plane stress due to temperature loading is
greatly affected by the skew angle variation and its magnitude is observed to be
minimum at higher value of the skew angle. The magnitudes of inter laminar
stresses are observed to be minimum at lower ratio. The transverse deflection
‘w’ decreases with increase in
skew angle.
Keywords and phrases: FEM, skew laminate, cutout, interlaminar stresses.
