Analysis of laminated composite plates using wavelet finite element method and higher-order plate theory

This paper presents an application of wavelet finite element method adopting B-spline wavelet on the interval to investigate static and free vibration problems of laminated composite plates. The energy of laminated composite plates is derived based on the higher-order plate theory, the wavelet-based BSWI element is constructed according to the principle of minimum total potential energy. WFEM employs two-dimensional BSWI scaling functions to replace polynomial interpolating functions used in traditional finite element method. Due to the excellent approximation properties of BSWI for structural analysis, WFEM could obtain accurate results with fewer degrees of freedoms. Numerical examples concerning the static and free vibration problems of symmetric and antisymmetric cross-ply/angle-ply laminated composite plates are displayed to elaborate the validity and high accuracy of the proposed wavelet-based method with three-dimensional elasticity and other referential results available in literatures. Meanwhile, the parametric effects of length-to-thickness ratios, layer numbers, fiber orientations and modular ratios on the deflections and frequencies are performed and discussed in details. In conclusion, WFEM has been proved to be an effective, accurate and stable numerical computation method for static and free vibration analysis of laminated composite plates.