Thermal buckling analysis of skew fibre-reinforced composite and sandwich plates using shear deformable finite element models

The paper considers the elastic buckling of skew fibre-reinforced composite and sandwich plates subjected to thermal loads. To the best of the authors' knowledge, there is no paper in the open literature on this subject and the present paper attempts to fill this gap. Two shear deformable finite element models, one based on first-order shear deformation theory and the other based on higher-order shear deformation theory, are employed to obtain thermal buckling solutions. Extensive numerical results are presented for both thin and thick laminated composite plates with various skew angles, lamination parameters and boundary conditions. A few results for skew sandwiches are obtained for various geometric parameters and skew angles. Results presented, not available so far, could be useful to designers and researchers who may use them as benchmark values to validate their numerical techniques and software for similar problems. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.