Extended Kantorovich method for local stresses in composite laminates upon polynomial stress functions

The extended Kantorovich method is employed to study the local stress concentrations at the vicinity of free edges in symmetrically layered composite laminates subjected to uniaxial tensile load upon polynomial stress functions. The stress fields are initially assumed by means of the Lekhnitskii stress functions under the plane strain state. Applying the principle of complementary virtual work, the coupled ordinary differential equations are obtained in which the solutions can be obtained by solving a generalized eigenvalue problem. Then an iterative procedure is established to achieve convergent stress distributions. It should be noted that the stress function based extended Kantorovich method can satisfy both the traction-free and free edge stress boundary conditions during the iterative processes. The stress components near the free edges and in the interior regions are calculated and compared with those obtained results by finite element method (FEM). The convergent stresses have good agreements with those results obtained by three dimensional (3D) FEM. For generality, various layup configurations are considered for the numerical analysis. The results show that the proposed polynomial stress function based extended Kantorovich method is accurate and efficient in predicting the local stresses in composite laminates and computationally much more efficient than the 3D FEM.