Free vibration and buckling analyses of laminated composite plates with cutout

This study aims to examine the effect of the diameter, number, and location of the circular cutout on the free vibration response and buckling loads of the laminated composites. Eigen-buckling and free vibrations analyses are performed for the laminated composite plates by using the finite element software ANSYS. Numerical results obtained by the finite element method are compared to the experimental ones. In the numerical analyses, the effect of the delamination around the cutout on the buckling load and the natural frequency is also examined. The critical buckling load and first natural frequency values obtained by both numerical and experimental studies are used to create a prediction model using the artificial neural networks. The Levenberg–Marquardt backpropagation algorithm is used as the training method. It is observed that both the number and location of the cutout affect the critical buckling load and first natural frequency values. Numerical and experimental results are presented together with the ANN prediction results.