Variational principle of combined energy—Mechanics of laminated structures

The conventional approaches for stress analysis of composite laminates have encountered discontinuity problems. In this paper, the C¹ continuity of displacements in the in-plane directions and C⁰ continuity of displacement along the thickness direction are discussed. Also, the global continuity of transverse stresses and local continuity of in-plane stresses are examined. Then, the formulations of stress analysis in both differential equation form and variational functional form are presented.