Buckling of composite plates using simple shear flexible finite elements

An eight-noded, shear flexible quadratic rectangular element with five degrees of freedom per node is developed in this paper, to study the effects of transverse shear on the stability of layered composite plates, under uni-axial and bi-axial compression for various boundary conditions. Green's nonlinear strain tensor is used to formulate the initial stress matrix (K_σ). The validity of the element is demonstrated by comparing the results from the present formulation with those existing in the literature.