Enhanced Elastic Buckling Loads of Composite Plates With Tailored Thermal Residual Stresses

Abstract

Thermal residual stresses introduced during the manufacturing process and their effect on the buckling load of stringer reinforced composite plates is investigated. The principal idea is to include stiffeners on the perimeter of the plate and thereby, during manufacture, induce a favorable thermal residual-stress state in the structure; these stresses arise by considering the difference in thermal expansion coefficients and elastic properties of the plate and the stiffeners. In this manner, it is shown that thermal residual stresses can be tailored to significantly enhance the performance of the structure. The analysis is taken within the context of an enhanced Reissner-Mindlin plate theory and the finite element technique is used to analyze the problem. A 16 node bi-cubic Lagrange element is implemented in a FORTRAN code to determine the buckling load of the composite plate in the presence of thermal residual stresses. Three different plate-stiffener geometries are used as illustrations. The analyses indicate that buckling loads can be significantly increased by properly tailoring the thermal residual stresses. Therefore it may be concluded that an evaluation of these stresses and a judicious analysis of their effects must be included in the design procedure for this class of composite structure.