Vibration and buckling of generally laminated composite plates with arbitrary edge conditions

A method is developed for the analysis of free vibration and buckling of generally laminated composite plates having arbitrary edge conditions, such as clamped, simply supported or free. The procedure is an extension of the Ritz method utilizing a strain energy functional containing both bending and stretching effects and accommodating arbitrary ply stacking sequences. Displacement functions are taken in the form of polynomials, and an algorithm for satisfying the geometric boundary conditions is presented. Numerical results are compared with those of other researchers in order to establish the correctness and effectiveness of the method. Some additional new results are also presented.