Asymmetric buckling of layered orthotropic circular and annular plates of varying thickness using a computationally economic semianalytical finite element approach

A semianalytical finite element approach to investigate the asymmetric buckling behaviour of tapered orthotropic laminated annular plates is presented. The prebuckling state of stress in the plate utilized to derive the geometric stiffness matrix is obtained analytically using a power series method. This avoids the finite element stress analysis to be carried out in the conventional finite element method, hence it saves the computational time. The results obtained from the present approach are found to be in very good agreement with those available in literature. Inconsistencies in some of the results reported in the literature are brought out in this paper. The effects of loading, boundary conditions, modular ratios, annular ratios, tapers, etc. on the buckling load of some equivolume configurations of the circular and annular plates are discussed and the least weight configurations of the same are obtained. Some typical results of cross-ply laminated annular plates are also presented.