Free vibration and buckling analysis of cross-ply laminated composite plates using Carrera's unified formulation based on Isogeometric approach

In this paper, The Isogeometric approach (IGA) and Carrera's Unified Formulation (CUF) are employed for free vibration and linearized buckling analysis of laminated composite plates. The non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) basis functions utilized in IGA, are employed as higher order smooth functions to approximate field solution leading to enhance precision of analysis. CUF presents an effective formulation to employ any order of Taylor expansion to analyze two-dimensional plate models. Higher order NURBS basis functions attenuate the shear locking properly and higher order theories supposed by CUF are free from Poisson locking phenomenon and they do not need the use of any shear correction factor. Therefore, combining IGA and CUF ends in a suitable methodology to analyze laminated plates.