A 3RD-ORDER TRIANGULAR MULTILAYERED PLATE FINITE-ELEMENT WITH CONTINUOUS INTERLAMINAR STRESSES

Based on a refined third-order shear deformation plate theory recently proposed by the author, a three-node, fully conforming, multilayered anisotropic plate element of arbitrary triangular shape is developed i n this paper. The element incorporates 10 nodal d.o.f., namely the two in-plane displacements, the two shear rotations, the transverse displ acement and its first and second derivatives, thus giving a total of 3 0 d.o.f. The formulation includes extension, bending and transverse sh ear deformation states; moreover, it fulfils a priori the geometric an d stress continuity conditions at the interfaces, and it requires only five generalized displacements to describe the kinematics of the plat e deformation. The formulated plate element is assessed for its perfor mance comparing its predictions either with exact solutions from the p late model or with other approximate two-dimensional solutions.