Stress analysis of thick orthotropic cantilever tubes under transverse loading

Abstract

In this work, a new high-order displacement-based method is proposed to investigate stresses and strains in thick arbitrary laminated orthotropic cantilever straight tubes under transverse loading. The most general displacement field of elasticity for an arbitrary thick laminated orthotropic straight tube is developed. A layer-wise method is employed to analytically determine the local displacement functions and stresses under transverse loading. The accuracy of the proposed method is subsequently verified by comparing the theoretical results with experimental data, finite-element method (FEM), and Lekhnitskii solution. The results show good agreement. In addition, high efficiency in terms of computational time is shown when the proposed method is used as compared with FEM. Finally, several numerical examples for stress and strain distributions in various thick cantilever composite straight tubes subjected to transverse loading are discussed.

Keywords:

• displacement field
• thick orthotropic cantilever straight tube
• displacement-based method
• layer-wise theory
• stress analysis
• transverse loading

Acknowledgments

The financial contributions from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) industrial chair on Automated Composites, Bombardier Aerospace, Bell Helicopter Textron Canada Ltd. and Concordia University are appreciated.