First Order Shear Deformation

Theory
The CPT ignores shear deformation
reasonable results for thin laminates.

effects

and

provides

However, it underestimates deflection and overestimates buckling

load and frequency of moderately thick or thick laminates where
shear deformation effects are more pronounced.
The FSDT proposed by Reissnerand Mindlinaccounts for shear
deformation effects by the way of linear variation of in-plane
displacements through the thickness.
Some more higher order theories also there but their equations of
motion are much more complicated than those of FSDT.

Theoretical formulation
Kinematics
The displacement field of the existing FSDT is given by

(1)

whereu,v,w,xandyare five unknown displacement functions of the mid plane of

the plate. By dividing the transverse displacementwinto bending and shear parts (i.e.,
w=wb+ws) and making further assumptions given byx=wb/xandy=wb/y,
the displacement field of the new theory can be rewritten in a simpler form as

(2)

Only four
unknowns
(u,v,w
,w
The nonzero strains associated with the displacement
field inbEq.
(2)s)are

(3)

Consider a rectangular plate of total

thicknesshcomposed
ofnorthotropic
layers with the coordinate system as
shown inFig. 1. Under the assumption
that each layer possesses a plane of
elastic symmetry parallel to thexyplane,
the constitutive equations for a layer can
be written as

whereQijare the material constants in

the material axes of the layer given as

Since the laminate is made of several orthotropic layers with their material axes oriented
arbitrarily with respect to the laminate coordinates, the constitutive equations of each layer must
be transformed to the laminate coordinates (x,y,z). The stressstrain relations in the laminate
coordinates of thekth layer are given as
where

are the transformed material constants given as

(4)

Equations of motion
Hamiltons principle is used herein to derive equations of motion. The principle can be stated in
an analytical form as

whereU,V, andKare the variations of strain energy, work done, and kinetic energy,
respectively. The variation of strain energy is calculated by

where

Substituting Eq. (3) into Eq. (4) and the subsequent results into Eq. (5),
the stress resultants are obtained in terms of displacements (u,v,wb,ws)
as

whereis the shear correction factor and (Aij,Bij,Dij) are the stiffness coefficients defined
by

The variation of work done by the transverse loadsqcan be expressed

as

V=-Aq(wb+ws)dA
The variation of kinetic energy can be written as
where dot-superscript convention indicates
the differentiation with respect to the time
variablet;is the mass density; and (I0,I2)
are mass inertias defined by

The following equations of motion are obtained:

The natural boundary conditions are of the form

u:Nxnx+Nxyny
ws:Qxnx+Qyny
where

v:Nxynx+Nyny

withnxandnybeing the direction cosines of the unit normal to the boundary of the middle plane.
Clearly, when the shear deformation effects are neglected (ws=0), the present theory recovers
the CPT.
The above boundary conditions can be rewritten in an explicit form as:
Clamped edge

finite elements based on the present theory require a continuous element with four
degrees of freedom per node (u,v,wb,ws)