Study of interlaminar stresses in composite laminates subjected to torsional loading

A computational procedure for accurate determination of interlaminar stresses in thick and thin composite laminates subjected to torsional loading is presented. A multilevel, recursively defined preconditioner in conjunction with the preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) algorithm is constructed from a sequence of hierarchical vector spaces arising from the p-version of the finite element method. The computational procedure is used to model stress fields in thick and thin laminates in torsion using three-dimensional and quasi-three-dimensional models. Results indicate that the preconditioner developed here can be used to produce an efficient iterative solver for the determination of two- and three-dimensional stress fields in composite structures.