Stability and vibration of thick laminated composite sector plates

This study presents a simple analytical formulation for the eigenvalue problem of buckling and free vibration analysis of shear deformable laminated sector plates made up of cylindrically orthotropic layers. The non-axisymmetric formulation in cylindrical coordinates is discretized in space domain in terms of two-dimensional Chebyshev polynomials. Several combinations of simply supported, clamped and free edge conditions are considered. Convergence study has been carried out and the obtained results are compared with the results of laminated square plates and isotropic sector plates available in literature. Extensive results pertaining to critical buckling loads and natural frequencies are presented. Effects of boundary conditions, number of layers, moduli ratio, rotary and in-plane inertia, plate thickness, sector angle and annularity are studied.