Stress and free vibration analyses of multilayered composite plates

This paper presents a two-phase computational procedure for the accurate prediction of vibration frequencies, stresses, and deformations in simply supported bidirectional multilayered composite plates. The range of applicability of this procedure in terms of the plate's parameters is determined, and the potential of the proposed procedure for use in conjunction with large-scale finite element modeling of composite structures is discussed. It is shown that the use of the shear correction factors calculated by this procedure extends the range of the validity of the first-order shear deformation theory, used in the first phase of the procedure, to fairly thick multilayered plates with the h/L1 ratio of the order of 0.3.