FINITE ELEMENT METHOD ANALYSIS OF A THICK COMPOSITE BEAMS AND PLATES

Abstract

There are some difficulties during determination of the material properties of thick composites when they are analyzed by using the finite element method. The most difficult of those is to determine material constants of multi layered composite elements. One of suggested method for solving this problem is to use an average value for element material properties. The effects of two averaging methods on the results were investigated. A finite element analysis program was developed to analyze the fiber reinforced composite beams and plates for displacement comparisons of different element numbers. The results also were compared with the analytical solutions. Beside the arithmetic average method, a new method called weighted average was developed. By considering different loading conditions, one of the averaging methods was utilized. The difficulty in determining the material properties of 8 node multi layered brick element used the finite element analysis of thick composite structures was overcome by using two averaging methods. The results were compared with the ones obtained from the elements without any averaging and analytical solutions. Both methods gave matching results for certain types of loading conditions.

Keywords

• Kompozit malzemeler, Sonlu elemanlar