Closed-form postbuckling analysis of shear-deformable composite laminated panels

Abstract This paper introduces a closed-form analytical approach to the postbuckling analysis of simply supported shear-deformable composite laminated plates under uniaxial compression. The analysis is based on three different laminate theories in order to explicitly account for transverse shear deformations and uses a geometrically nonlinear formulation in conjunction with the Ritz method in order to enable closed-form analytical expressions for the state variables of buckled composite plates. Results are presented for several different plate configurations, and a comparison is performed with literature results as well as comparative finite element computations which leads to a very satisfying results accuracy. The presented analysis method delivers results without any significant numerical effort and is thus especially suited for practical applications where such postbuckling analyses are performed many times.