A comprehensive study on the buckling behaviour of woven composite plates with major aerospace cutouts under uniaxial loading

Abstract

Current research paper presents a comprehensive study based on Finite Element Method (FEM) to understand the effect of cutout shape and area on the buckling behaviour of E-glass composite plates. Considered plate has a dimension of 150 mm × 75mm × 3mm where loading edges are simple supported (shorter side) and other two edges are free. Major aerospace cutout shapes i.e. circular, square, elliptical (horizontal and vertical) and diamond are studied to understand their effect on plates’ critical buckling load. FE code Ansys is adopted to investigate the case studies. A limited number of experimental tests are also carried out in order to validate the FE code results. Overall, a good agreement between experimental and FE code results are found. From finite element analyses, it is found that for any cutout shape, as the cutout area increases, buckling load decreases significantly. Moreover, increasing the plate thickness by 0.5 mm can raise the buckling load up to 50%. More importantly, fibre orientation angle has most significant effect on the critical buckling load of plates where fibre orientation aligned with loading direction can increase the plates’ critical buckling load from 2.6 to 2.8 times than aligned with 900.