Cylindrical Bending and Vibration of Polar Material Laminates

This article considers a plane strain problem, which is known in conventional linear elasticity as cylindrical bending of simply supported plates and cross-ply laminates. By considering fibrous composites containing fibers resistant to bending, it formulates and solves corresponding polar elasticity equations governing the static and dynamic behavior of beam-like components made of a homogeneous or layered transversely isotropic material; each layer has embedded a single family of fibers. Fiber bending stiffness is accounted for through involvement of an extra elastic modulus, which, unlike its conventional elasticity counterparts that have dimensions of stress, has dimensions of force. Its involvement in the analysis implies existence of some intrinsic material area or length parameter, which may be associated, for instance, with fiber thickness of fiber spacing. A considerable amount of relevant numerical results are presented for thick beam components made of either homogeneous or two-layered transversely isotropic material. For the static bending problem, these include a detailed presentation of through-thickness distributions of displacements, stresses, as well as couple-stress. For the dynamic problem, attention is focused on the influence that fiber bending stiffness exerts on fundamental frequency parameters.