Free vibration of laminated plates by a variable-kinematic Chebyshev-Ritz method

Lorenzo Dozio Department of Aerospace Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy Erasmo Carrera Department of Aeronautics and Space Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

Introduction. Laminated composite plates are widely used as structural components in many engineering applications. They are typically characterized by higher shear and normal exibility than traditional isotropic plates and exhibit the so-called zig-zag form of displacement eld in the thickness direction. Such properties, along with high degrees of orthotropy and moderate thickness-to-length ratios, put great diculties in achieving accurate description of their mechanical behavior using classical plate theories. A considerable eort was thus made to derive rened 2-D modeling of multilayered structures, ranging from higher-order equivalent single layer (ESL) theories to layer-wise (LW) formulations [1]. At the same time, related techniques that were suitable for ecient computer implementation of the above theories have been developed. In this context, a powerful approach, referred as Carreras unied formulation (CUF), was introduced by the second author in the mid-nineties of the last century. It is a formal technique permitting to handle in an unied manner an innite number of 2-D displacement-based or mixed ESL and LW axiomatic plate and shell theories with variable kinematic properties. CUF was successfully implemented to obtain Navier-type analytical solutions and nite element results for bending, buckling and vibration problems of transversely anisotropic structures. Present study. Attention is focused in this study on extending CUF to the Ritz method for free vibration analysis of straight-sided quadrilateral laminated plates having an arbitrary combination of free, clamped and simply supported boundary conditions. It is widely recognized that the Ritz method has a high spectral accuracy and converge faster than local methods such as nite elements. Therefore, it can provide reliable upper-bound benchmark vibration results and can be quite suitable during preliminary design studies and/or parametric analyses. Contrary to all previous Ritz-based formulations relying on axiomatic plate models with a xed kinematic theory, the present approach allows to generate arbitrarily accurate Ritz solutions from a large variety of higher-order ESL and LW theories by properly expanding so-called Ritz fundamental nuclei of the plate mass and stiness matrices. The Ritz fundamental nuclei are invariant with respect to the order of theory and thus no ad hoc theoretical development and software coding is needed when the order is changed. Chebyshev polynomials multiplied by boundary functions are used here as admissible functions. The combination of formalism of CUF and Ritz expansion based on Chebyshev polynomials has been denoted as variablekinematic Chebyshev-Ritz method. Mathematical modeling. A general quadrilateral at laminated plate of uniform thickness h and Nl orthotropic layers is considered. For generality and convenience, the formulation is expressed in dimensionless form. Thus, the actual quadrilateral plate in the x y physical domain is mapped into a square plate in the computational domain (1 , 1). The constitutive equations of a

generic layer k are written as:

(1)

where and are the stresses and strains, split into in-plane (p) and out-of-plane (n) components, and matrices C contain the elastic coecients. According to CUF and assuming harmonic motion with circular frequency , the displacement vector for each k-th lamina is expressed through an indicial notation over as follows: jt uk (, , z, t) = F (z ) uk (2) (, )e where = t, r, b, r = 2, . . . , N 1, F (z ) are assumed thickness functions and N is the order of the theory. Note that in Eq. (2) the summation convention for repeated indices is implied. Strains are linearly related to displacements according to the following relations:
jt k k p = F (z )Dp u (, )e jt jt k k + F,z (z ) uk n = F (z )Dn u (, )e (, )e

(3)

where Dp and Dn are matrices of dierential operators. Following the standard Ritz procedure and introducing another indicial notation over i, the components of the displacement amplitude vector k u (, ) are approximated by sets of two-dimensional nite series as follows:
k k u (, ) = i (, )c i

(4)

in which i = 1, . . . , M and i is a 3 3 diagonal matrix whose elements i (, ) ( = u, v, w) are given by the product of a two-dimensional polynomial pi (, ) and a boundary-compliant function b (, ) such that b i (, ) = b (5) (, )pi (, ) = (, )pq ( )pr ( ) ps () = cos [(s 1) arccos()], (s = 1, 2, . . . , P ; = , ), is the 1-D s-th Chebyshev polynomial and the indices i, q and r are related by the following expression: i = P (q 1)+r . Using the above quantities, the maximum strain energy Umax and the maximum kinetic energy Tmax of the plate vibrating harmonically are given by N N 1 2 l kT 1 l kT k c i Kk sij csj Tmax = c i Mk sij ck (6) Umax = sj 2 2
k =1 k =1

where
+1

Kk sij =
1

k k k k k k (Dp i )T E s Cpp (Dp sj ) + E s Cpn (Dn sj ) + E s,z Cpn sj k k k k k k + (Dn i )T E s Cnp (Dp sj ) + E s Cnn (Dn sj ) + E s,z Cnn sj k k k k k k +T i E,z s Cnp (Dp sj ) + E,z s Cnn (Dn sj ) + E,z s,z Cnn sj +1

(7)

|J|dd (8)

Mk sij =
1

k k T i E s sj |J|dd

are 3 3 matrices representing the Ritz fundamental nuclei of the formulation. In Eqs. (7,8) |J| is the determinant of the Jacobian matrix of the transformation and the following layer integrals k k k k = are introduced: E s k F Fs dz , E s,z = k F Fs,z dz , E,z s = k F,z Fs dz , E,z s,z = k F,z Fs,z dz . The global stiness K and mass M matrix of the plate are obtained by rst expanding at a layer level the fundamental nuclei through variation of the indices and s. The corresponding matrices at multilayer level are assembled according to the used variable descriptions. In the ESL case these matrices are simply summed, whereas LW models require continuity of displacement variables at the

1 corresponding to some Table 1: Comparison of the rst four frequency parameters = h 1 /E2 o lower-order modes of a square simply-supported cross-ply [0/90 ] plate with h/b = 0.1. Mode (m, n) (1,1) Theory Exact [2] ED6 LD3 Exact [2] ED6 LD3 Exact [2] ED6 LD3 1 0.06027 0.06041 0.06027 0.14539 0.14609 0.14539 0.20229 0.20344 0.20229 2 0.52994 0.53404 0.52994 0.62352 0.62470 0.62352 0.95796 0.96443 0.95796 3 0.58275 0.58406 0.58275 0.95652 0.96396 0.95653 1.03000 1.03280 1.03001 4 1.23675 1.23887 1.23684 1.23891 1.23980 1.23901 1.23958 1.24092 1.23969

(1,2)(2,1)

(2,2)

1 for clamped antiTable 2: Comparison of the rst eight frequency parameters = b2 / 2 h 1 /E2 symmetric angle-ply [45o / 45o /45o / 45o ] rhombic composite laminates with h/a = 0.1. Skew angle 30o Theory Ref. [3] FSDT ED3 LD2 Ref. [3] FSDT ED3 LD2 1 2.6325 2.7415 2.6332 2.5864 3.3015 3.4429 3.3029 3.2463 2 3.9549 4.1217 3.9555 3.8889 4.6290 4.8218 4.6297 4.5577 3 4.7125 4.9126 4.7116 4.6365 5.8423 6.0844 5.8393 5.7535 Mode 4 5 5.2107 6.3577 5.4393 6.6178 5.2082 6.3554 5.1223 6.2625 6.0039 7.0792 6.2411 7.3679 6.0027 7.0710 5.9219 6.9747 6 6.4954 6.7834 6.4892 6.3891 7.7269 8.0201 7.7221 7.6256 7 6.9760 7.2749 6.9684 6.8693 8.2726 8.6065 8.2560 8.1521 8 7.7176 8.0387 7.7069 7.6034 8.9874 9.3235 8.9741 8.8731

45o

interface. Finally, resulting matrices are expanded by varying the indices i, j related to the Ritz expansion. Matrices K and M have dimensions 3M (N + 1) 3M (N + 1) for ESL models and [3(N + 1)Nl 3(Nl 1)]M [3(N + 1)Nl 3(Nl 1)]M for LW models. The extremization of the energy functional = Umax Tmax with respect to the coecients ck i yields a standard generalized eigenvalue problem. Results. Two preliminary results are here presented to show the applicability of the method. A square simply-supported cross-ply [0/90o ] plate with thickness-to-length ratio 0.1 is rst considered in Table 1. Ritz solutions obtained with a sixth-order ESL theory (ED6) and a third-order layer-wise theory (LD3) are compared against exact solutions from [2] for the rst four frequency parameters 1 corresponding to lower-order modes (1,1), (1,2)=(2,1) and (2,2). It is seen that very = h 1 /E2 good agreement is obtained with LW models. A second example is shown in Table 2, where the rst eight non-dimensional frequencies of clamped angle-ply [45o / 45o /45o / 45o ] rhombic composite laminates with h/a = 0.1 and two skew angles are presented. Numerical values computed from rstorder shear deformation theory (FSDT), a third-order ESL theory (ED3) and a second-order layer-wise theory (LD2) are compared with nite element results from [3]. ED3 solutions agree with reference values. It is seen that more accurate results are obtained using a LW model.

References
[1] E. Carrera, Theories and nite elements for multilayered, anisotropic, composite plates and shells, Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering, 9 (2002), 87-140. [2] W.Q. Chen, C.F. Lue, 3D free vibration analysis of cross-ply laminated plates with one pair of opposite edges simply supported, Composite Structures, 69 (2005), 77-87. [3] A.K. Garg, R.K. Khare, T. Kant, Free vibration of skew ber-reinforced composite and sandwich laminates using a shear deformable nite element model, Journal of Sandwich Structures and Materials, 8 (2006), 33-52.