A COMPARISON OF COMPUTED DEFLECTIONS OF SYMMETRIC ANGLE-PLY LAMINATE PLATES BY THE RITZ METHOD AND THE FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

摘要

When a simply supported composite plate is subjected to a lateral load, the presence of the twist coupling stiffnesses in the governing differential equations of equilibrium does not allow the determination of an exact solution for the deflection and numerical methods must be used. This paper describes a comparison of computed approximations to the deflection of composite laminates subjected to transverse loading obtained using the Ritz method and the finite element method. The Ritz method is implemented with the symbolic manipulation program Maple and ANSYS is used to perform the finite element calculations. Reliable results are obtained using both methods.