Finite element bending behaviour of composite hyperbolic paraboloidal shells with various edge conditions

A general finite element procedure with an eight-noded isoparametric curved quadratic element is presented to investigate the static behaviour of laminated composite hyperbolic paraboloidal shells bounded by straight edges (commonly called hypar shells). Numerical results are obtained for uniformly loaded laminated composite hypar shells with six practical boundary conditions, where the edges are differently restrained. Eight different types of lamination including single layered and multi-layered, cross-ply and angle-ply, symmetric and antisymmetric stacking orders are chosen. The numerical results of different shell actions of 48 combinations are furnished to estimate their relative performances. The authors further propose typical comparative performance matrix to study the relative efficiencies of different stacking combinations, which will be a great help in design.