Quantification of epistemic uncertainty in laminated composite plates under static and in-plane loads using trigonometric shear deformation theory

In the present study, epistemic uncertainty is quantified for bending and buckling analysis of laminated composite plates using evidence theory. By employing vertex and uniform sampling methods the degree of confidence of the failure analysis is carried out in terms of belief and plausibility. Dempster's rule of combination is used when the analysis subjected to more number of experts under vertex and sampling methods. To proceed the uncertainty quantification for the composite plates a trigonometric higher order shear deformation theory is assessed by analytical and finite element formulation. Numerical examples are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods for failure analysis based evidence theory of real engineering problems. Considering various parameters such as size of focal element, uncertain variables as material and geometric parameters, more number of uncertain variables and more number experts for each uncertain variable the quantification is executed. From the numerical examples, it is observed that for quantifying the epistemic uncertainty employing more experts for uncertain variables is the favorable choice.