Vibrations drive many engineering designs in today’s engineering environment. There has been an enormous amount of research into this area of research over the last decade. This book documents some of the latest research in the field of vibration of composite shells and plates filling a much-needed gap in the market. Laminated composite shells have many engineering applications including aerospace, mechanical, marine and automotive engineering. This book makes an ideal reference for researchers and practicing engineers alike. The first book of its kind Documents 10 years of research in the field of composite shells Many Engineering applications

This book develops a uniform accurate method which is capable of dealing with vibrations of laminated beams, plates and shells with arbitrary boundary conditions including classical boundaries, elastic supports and their combinations. It also provides numerous solutions for various configurations including various boundary conditions, laminated schemes, geometry and material parameters, which fill certain gaps in this area of reach and may serve as benchmark solutions for the readers. For each case, corresponding fundamental equations in the framework of classical and shear deformation theory are developed. Following the fundamental equations, numerous free vibration results are presented for various configurations including different boundary conditions, laminated sequences and geometry and material properties. The proposed method and corresponding formulations can be readily extended to static analysis.

With increasingly sophisticated structures involved in modern engineering, knowledge of the complex vibration behavior of plates, shells, curved membranes, rings, and other complex structures is essential for today‘s engineering students, since the behavior is fundamentally different than that of simple structures such as rods and beams. Now in its

Laminated Composite Plates and Shells presents a systematic and comprehensive coverage of the three-dimensional modelling of these structures. It uses the state space approach to provide novel tools for accurate three-dimensional analyses of thin and thick structural components composed of laminated composite materials. In contrast to the traditional treatment of laminated materials, the state space method guarantees a continuous interfacial stress field across material boundaries. Other unique features of the analysis include the non-dependency of a problem's degrees of freedom on the number of material layers of a laminate. Apart from the introductions to composite materials, three-dimensional elasticity and the concept of state space equations presented in the first three chapters, the book reviews available analytical and numerical three-dimensional state space solutions for bending, vibration and buckling of laminated composite plates and shells of various shapes. The applications of the state space method also include the analyses of piezoelectric laminates and interfacial stresses near free edges. The book presents numerous tables and graphics that show accurate three-dimensional solutions of laminated structural components. Many of the numerical results presented in the book are important in their own right and also as test problems for validating new numerical methods. Laminated Composite Plates and Shells will be of benefit to all materials and structural engineers looking to understand the detailed behaviour of these important materials. It will also interest academic scientists researching that behaviour and engineers from more specialised fields such as aerospace which are becoming increasingly dependent on composites.

The second edition of this popular text provides complete, detailed coverage of the various theories, analytical solutions, and finite element models of laminated composite plates and shells. The book reflects advances in materials modeling in general and composite materials and structures in particular. It includes a chapter dedicated to the theory and analysis of laminated shells, discussions on smart structures and functionally graded materials, exercises and examples, and chapters that were reorganized from the first edition to improve the clarity of the presentation.