Analysis of mixed finite elements for laminated composite plates

The approximation to the solution of a laminated plate problem is considere d. The main result consists in proving that a performant scheme can be obta ined by simply coupling a standard membrane element for the in-plane displa cements with a robust method for plate bending problem. both elements relat ed to the case of homogeneous material. A rigorous convergence analysis is developed fur the case of clamped boundary conditions. Numerical results ar e presented, showing the accordance between the theoretical results and the actual computations. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.