Impact Behavior of Thick Laminated Composite Beams

In the present investigation a higher-order shear deformation theory (HST) and the conventional first-order theory (FST) are used to develop a finite element method to analyze the impact behavior of laminated composite beams. The higher-order theory assumes all the displacement components u, v, w that contain variation up to cubic power of z. The effects of various parameters, such as span to thickness ratios, support conditions and stacking sequence on the impact behavior of laminated composite beams are studied. Both eight-noded and nine-noded isoparametric elements are employed to compare the computational efficiency. However, to save computational time, numerical results are generated using only eight-noded isoparametric elements. The present results compare well with those of W. Goldsmith. It is observed that stresses computed using HST and FST exhibit wide variations.