AN EDGE-BASED SMOOTHED FINITE ELEMENT METHOD FOR ANALYSIS OF LAMINATED COMPOSITE PLATES

This paper promotes a novel numerical approach to static, free vibration and buckling analyses of laminated composite plates by an edge-based smoothed finite method (ES-FEM). In the present ES-FEM formulation, the system stiffness matrix is established by using the strain smoothing technique over the smoothing domains associated with the edges of the triangular elements. A discrete shear gap (DSG3) technique without shear locking is combined into the ES-FEM to give a so-called edge-based smoothed discrete shear gap method (ES-DSG3) for analysis of laminated composite plates. The present method uses only linear interpolations and its implementation into finite element programs is quite simple. Numerical results for analysis of laminated composite plates show that the ES-DSG3 performs quite well compared to several other published approaches in the literature.