Stress Analysis Of Laminated Composite Beam With I-section

The advantage of material properties and flexibility of choosing material have made composite materials a primary preference for structural application. Unlike isotropic materials, the parametric study of composite beams for optimized design is complicated due to high number of parameters involved in designing like lay-up sequence, and layer configuration. Moreover, the limitations of FEA techniques in designing have created a need for an analytical closed-form solution for stress analysis of laminated composite beams. The objective of this study focuses on the development of an analytical method for stress analysis of composite I-beam. This method includes the structural response due to unsymmetrical and/or unbalanced of laminate as well as unsymmetrical I-beam cross-section. These structural characteristics are often ignored in the most published studies. Analytical closed-form expressions for the sectional properties such as centroid, axial and bending stiffnesses of composite I-beam are derived. These sectional properties are then used to calculate the stress and strain of each ply of I-beam at any given location. Further, a finite element model is created using commercial software ANSYS 11.0 classic. The stress and strain results obtained by analytical method have excellent agreement with the results obtained from the finite element analysis.