Vibration of woven fiber laminated composite plates in hygrothermal environment

Abstract

The present study deals with both experimental and numerical investigation on the free vibration behavior of laminated composite plates subjected to varying temperature and moisture. A simple laminated plate model is developed for the vibration of composite plates subjected to hygrothermal loading. A computer program based on finite element method in the MATLAB environment is developed to perform all necessary computations. The woven fiber glass/epoxy specimens were hygrothermally conditioned in a humidity cabinet where the conditions were maintained at temperatures of 300–425 K and relative humidity ranging from 0% to 1.0% for moisture concentrations. Quantitative results are presented to show the effects of geometry, material and lamination parameters of woven fiber laminate on the free vibration of composite plates for different temperature and moisture concentrations. The numerical and experimental results show that there is reduction in natural frequency in Hz with the increase in temperature and moisture concentration for laminates with simply supported and clamped boundary conditions with different aspect ratio and side-to-thickness ratios.