Study of interlaminar stresses in composite laminates subjected to torsional loading

A computational procedure for accurate determination of interlaminar stress es in thick and thin composite laminates subjected to torsional loading is presented. B multilevel, recursively defined preconditioner in conjunction with the preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) algorithm is constructed f rom a sequence of hierarchical vector spaces arising from the p-version of the finite element method. The computational procedure is used to model str ess fields in thick and thin laminates in torsion using three-dimensional a nd quasi-three-dimensional models. Results indicate that the preconditioner developed here can be used to produce an efficient iterative solver for th e determination of two- and three-dimensional stress fields in composite st ructures.