Isogeometric Stress, Vibration and Stability Analysis of In-Plane Laminated Composite Structures

We present a computational study that develops isogeometric analysis based on higher-order smooth NURBS basis functions for the analysis of in-plane laminated composites. Focusing on the stress, vibration and stability analysis of angle-ply and cross-ply 2D structures, we compare the convergence of the strain energy error and selected stress components, eigen-frequencies and buckling loads according to overkill solutions. Our results clearly demonstrate that for in-plane laminated composite structures, isogeometric analysis is able to provide the same accuracy at a significantly reduced number of degrees of freedom with respect to standard C0 finite elements. In particular, we observe that the smoothness of spline basis functions enables high-quality stress solutions, which are superior to the ones obtained with conventional finite elements.