A COMMON EVALUATION OF THE MULTILAYERED COMPOSITE PLATE AND SHELLS ANALYSIS

This review article is devoted to the developments and ideas for the analysis of multilayered composite plate and shells. In the first part; the paper presents a through review of the literature involving the use in the modeling of multilayered plates and shells. A second part reviews relevant key points that should be considered for an accurate stress and strain fields, herein referred to as C^0 requirements (zig-zag form of the displacement field in the thickness direction and continuity of transverse normal and shear stresses at each layer interface). In the third part, the paper explains one of the mixed variation principles Hellinger-Reissner (HR) in view of C^0 requirements. It is then shown that Reissner’s mixed variational theorem (RMVT) can be simply constructed by adding the constraint equations (Lagrange multiplier) for the transverse stresses to Hellinger Reissner Principle (HR). The mixed form of Hooke’s law has also been derived in this section. The final part of the paper is devoted to giving an overview with selected results of numerical performance that can be acquired by RMVT applications; comparison to elasticity solutions and other significant analyses, based on classical and refined approaches are given. It is concluded that RMVT leads to a better description than classical analysis formulated with only displacement variables.