Three-dimensional thermal stress analysis of laminated composite plates with general layups by a sampling surfaces method

• Application of the method of sampling surfaces to thermal composite laminates.
• 3D thermal stress analysis of laminated orthotropic and anisotropic plates.
• Analytical solutions for simply supported cross-ply and angle-ply plates.

A paper focuses on the application of the method of sampling surfaces (SaS) to three-dimensional (3D) steady-state thermoelasticity problems for orthotropic and anisotropic laminated plates subjected to thermal loading. This method is based on selecting inside the nth layer In not equally spaced SaS parallel to the middle surface of the plate in order to choose temperatures and displacements of these surfaces as basic plate variables. Such an idea permits the presentation of the proposed thermoelastic laminated plate formulation in a very compact form. It is worth noting that the SaS are located inside each layer at Chebyshev polynomial nodes that leads to a uniform convergence of the SaS method. As a result, the SaS method can be applied efficiently to the 3D stress analysis of cross-ply and angle-ply composite plates with a specified accuracy utilizing the sufficient number of SaS.