Stability Analysis of Composite Plates with Through-the-Width Delamination

In this paper, the compressive bucking and postbuckling behavior of composite laminates with through-the-width delamination are investigated. The analytical method is based on the first-order shear deformation theory, and its formulation is developed on the basis of the Rayleigh-Ritz approximation technique by the implementation of the polynomial series, which has been used for the first time in the case of the mixed mode of buckling. Both local buckling of the delaminated sublaminate and global buckling of the whole plate are investigated. Also, the contact among sublaminates is taken into account. The three-dimensional finite-element analysis is performed by using ANSYS5.4 general-purpose commercial software just to compare the finite-element method results with those obtained by the analytical model. It is noted that the significance and contribution of the current paper lies in the fact that for a rather complicated problem, very good results are obtained by using a fairly small number of degrees of freedom through the application of complete polynomial series.