FLEXURAL ANALYSIS OF FIBROUS COMPOSITE BEAMS UNDER VARIOUS MECHANICAL LOADINGS USING REFINED SHEAR DEFORMATION THEORIES

The present study deals with the flexural analysis of single-layer fibrous composite beams using several displacement-based shear deformation theories. The theories accounts for the parabolic variation of shear stress through the thickness of a beam, so that the shear correction factor is not needed. The number of unknown variables in all the theories is the same as in the first-order shear deformation theory. These theories utilize displacement models which contain polynomial, trigonometric, hyperbolic, and exponential functions in terms of the thickness coordinate to represent the displacement variation across the thickness. A unified displacement field is used to represent all the theories. The governing differential equations and associated boundary conditions are obtained by using the principle of virtual work. A static flexural analysis is carried out for simply supported fibrous composite beams subjected to different mechanical loadings. The results obtained using all the theories are compared with those obtained by exact elasticity solution for a sinusoidal load and then their validity is checked for other loading conditions.