Bending, buckling and free vibration of laminated composite and sandwich beams: A critical review of literature

Laminated composite and sandwich structures are lightweight structures that can be found in many diverse applications especially civil, mechanical and aerospace engineering. The rapid increase in the industrial use of these structures has necessitated the development of new theories that suitable for the bending, buckling and vibration analysis of composite structures. Many review articles are reported in the literature on laminated composite plates and shells in the last few decades. But, in the whole variety of literature very few review articles are available exclusively on laminated composite and sandwich beams. In this article, a critical review of literature on bending, buckling and free vibration analysis of shear deformable isotropic, laminated composite and sandwich beams based on equivalent single layer theories, layerwise theories, zig-zag theories and exact elasticity solution is presented. In addition to this, literature on finite element modeling of laminated and sandwich beams based on classical and refined theories is also reviewed. Finally, displacement fields of various equivalent single layer and layerwise theories are summarized in the present study for the reference of researchers in this area. This article cites 515 references and highlights, the possible scope for the future research on laminated composite and sandwich beams.