Buckling of fiber-reinforced viscoelastic composite plates using various plate theories

This paper studies the quasi-static stability analysis of fiber-reinforced viscoelastic composite plates subjected to in-plane edge load systems. The study is based on a unified shear-deformable plate theory. This theory enables the trial and testing of different through-thickness transverse shear-strain distributions and, among them, strain distributions that do not involve the undesirable implications of the transverse shear correction factors. Using the method of effective moduli solves the equations governing the stability of simply supported fiber-reinforced viscoelastic composite plates. The solution concerns the determination of the critical in-plane edge loads associated with the asymptotic instability of plates. In a study of this problem the general quasi-static stability solutions are compared with those based on the classical, first-order and sinusoidal transverse shear-deformation theories. Numerical applications using higher-order shear-deformation theory are presented and comparisons with the results of other theories are formulated.