A study of transient response of initially stressed composite sandwich folded plates

In this paper a C° four node flat facetted shell element with drilling rotational degrees of freedom based on a first order shear deformation shell theory is developed to study the transient response of initially stressed composite sandwich folded plates. The new shell element contains three translations, two rotations of the normals about the shell mid-plane, and one drilling rotational degree of freedom per node. A consistent mass matrix formulation is employed to evaluate the total kinetic energy of the system. A generic validation study is carried out to evaluate the performance of the present finite element formulation. New results are presented for the transient analysis of initially stressed composite sandwich folded plate structures.