First ply failure analysis of laminated stiffened plates

A new laminated stiffened plate element is presented for the first ply failure analysis of laminated stiffened plates. The plate element can accommodate any number of arbitrarily oriented stiffeners and obviates the use of mesh lines along the stiffener. Therefore the mesh generation is no longer constrained by the disposition of the stiffener and a computationally economic mesh can be generated without any loss of accuracy. The first ply failure loads of cross-ply stiffened plates is estimated with the present formulation under uniformly distributed load and sinusoidal load using various prominent failure theories and compared with the published results. The results are found to be in good agreement. A few parametric studies are carried out on laminated plates stiffened with blade, I- and hat section stiffeners for varying fibre angles ranging from 15degrees to 75degrees. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.