An application of the node-based smoothed finite element method for buckling analysis of laminated composite plates

Abstract

An application of the node-based smoothed finite element method (NS-FEM) for buckling analyses of laminated composite plates using three-node triangular elements is exploited in this paper. A system stiffness matrix is calculated by using the strain smoothing technique over the smoothing domains associated with nodes of elements. In order to avoid the transverse shear locking and to improve the accuracy of the present formulation, the NS-FEM is incorporated with the discrete shear gap (DSG) method together with a stabilization technique to give a so-called node-based smoothed stabilized discrete shear gap method (NS-DSG). The numerical results derived from this method are compared with the solutions available in the literature to validate their reliability.