Influence of Lamination and Boundary Constraint on the Deformation of Moderately Thick Cross-Ply Rectangular Plates

Hitherto unavailable analytical solutions to boundary-value problems of moderately thick general cross-ply laminated rectangular plates, subjected to various boundary conditions, are presented. A recently developed double Fourier series-based method has been utilized to solve a system of five highly coupled linear second-order par tial differential equations (with constant coefficients), that emerge from the first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT) and the associated geometric and natural boundary con ditions. The convergence characteristics of the series solutions, especially their de pendence on lamination and boundary constraint, are numerically investigated in detail. Other numerical results presented here include (1) verification with the available analytical solutions based on the classical lamination theory (CLT) as well as FSDT, (2) investigation of the effect of length-to-thickness, length-to-width and modular ratios on the response of antisymmetric and symmetric cross-ply plates, with various boundary constraints and (3) spatial variation of displacements and moments.