A NEW METHOD FOR ANALYZING WAVE-FIELDS IN LAMINATED COMPOSITE PLATES - 2-DIMENSIONAL CASES

A new method is proposed to analyse the wave field in a laminated comp osite plate excited by an incident wavelet of low to intermediate freq uency. In this method, several techniques are combined to avoid numeri cal difficulties and obtain a high computational efficiency. To deal w ith the problem caused by the inhomogeneity of the plate in the thickn ess direction, the finite element technique is used to divide the plat e into strip elements. The Fourier transform is then used in the horiz ontal direction of the plate. In dealing with the time integration, th e Newmark scheme (a direct integral scheme) is employed to obtain the displacement in the Fourier transform domain. Finally, the wave field in the plate is obtained by an inverse Fourier integration. The presen t method can be used for laminates with many layers, and the integrand for the inverse Fourier transform behaves very well and is easy to ev aluate. Examples are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the pr esent method, and wave fields in laminated composite plates are also i nvestigated.