A NEW TREFFTZ BASED FINITE ELEMENT FOR STATIC ANALYSIS OF LAMINATED COMPOSITE STRUCTURES

Composite materials have been widely used in industries for several years owing to their capability to perform better than homogeneous isotropic materials. Numerical tools like finite element method are efficiently used for analysis of structures made of composite materials. However, for complex shapes or geometries of structures, it becomes uneconomical (computational resource wise) to use Rayleigh-Ritz based finite element analysis. An unique Trefftz based finite element has been developed in this article to efficiently fill the gap in the above mentioned scenario. Hybrid-Tefftz finite element method's flexibility to use arbitrary shaped elements comes handy in modelling complex geometries. The developed hybrid-Trefftz finite element approach has been used on symmetric angle-ply laminated composite plate and the obtained results have been compared with bench mark solutions. The present method proposes an approach for development of hybrid-Trefftz type finite elements, by which analysis of antisymmetric structures is also possible, an area of research which has been less explored by such approach as revealed from survey of available open literature.