STRUCTURAL SIMILITUDE AND SCALING LAWS FOR BUCKLING OF CROSS-PLY LAMINATED PLATES

The increasing use of laminated composite components for a wide variet y of applications in aerospace, mechanical, and other branches of engi neering requires extensive experimental evaluation of any new design. Thus, it is extremely useful if a full-scale structure can be replaced by a similar scaled-down model, which is much easier to work with. Th e objective of this study is to investigate problems associated with t he design of scaled models. Similitude theory is employed to develop t he necessary similarity conditions. Both complete and partial similari ty are discussed. The procedure consists of systematically observing t he effect of each parameter and corresponding scaling laws. Then accep table intervals and limitations for these parameters and scaling laws are discussed. In each case, a set of valid scaling factors and corres ponding response scaling laws that accurately predict the response of prototypes from experimental models is introduced. Particular emphasis is placed on the cases of buckling of rectangular cross-ply laminated plates under uniaxial compressive and shear loads. This analytical st udy indicates that distorted models with a different number of layers and different material properties and geometries from those of the pro totype can predict the behavior of the prototype with good accuracy.