Behaviour of Laminated Composite Twisted Plates Subjected to In-Plane Loading

Abstract

The twisted panel has various applications in turbine blades, compressor blades, fan blades and particularly in gas turbines. Many of these plates are subjected to in-plane load due to fluid or aerodynamic pressures. Hence it is necessary to study their behaviour under different types of loads. In these days, composite materials are increasingly used as load bearing structural components in aerospace and naval structures, automobiles, pressure vessels, turbine blades and many other engineering applications because of their high specific strength and stiffness. The analysis is carried out using ANSYS software. An eight-node iso parametric quadratic element is considered in the present analysis with five degrees of freedom per node. In ANSYS, the shell 281 element with five degrees of freedom per node is used. An eight by eight mesh is found to give good accuracy. The vibration and stability behaviour of composite laminated twisted plate under various types of non-uniform in-plane loading is studied. The effect of number of layers, changing angle of twist, width to thickness ratio, aspect ratio, etc on the vibration and buckling loads are presented. It is observed that for increasing angles of twist of laminated composite plate with different in-plane load conditions, the vibration and buckling both decreases. Also as the number of layers increases, the vibration and buckling parameters of the laminated twisted plate are both observed to increases.