Extended Reduced Bending Stiffness Method for Shear Deformable Laminated Plates

For the development of fast and simple computational methods for practical application in lightweight design, it is beneficial to simplify complex coupling behaviours of composite laminates. To this end, the RBS method is commonly used. Here, the method based on the framework of the classical laminated plate theory yields agreeable results for most configurations. However, the effect of shear deformation in laminates is not considered. Therefore, the novel formulation of the reduced bending stiffness (RBS) method for application in the framework of the third-order shear deformation theory (TSDT) is evaluated in the present work. Bending, buckling, and vibration are investigated for antisymmetric cross-ply laminates and antisymmetric angle-ply laminates. The presented results show the significant influence of the relative thickness which reduces the deviation of the RBS results relative to the Navier solution. The extended RBS method yields good agreement and presents the opportunity to simplify computational models in the framework of the TSDT.