Static analysis of thick rectangular laminated plates: three-dimensional elasticity solutions via differential quadrature element method

This article presents the ®rst endeavor to develop the di€erential quadrature element method for static solution of three-dimensional elasticity equations of thick rectangular laminated composite plates. The domain decomposition technique is employed to decompose a laminated plate into elements according to material layers. The di€erential quadrature (DQ) method is then applied to each element where the material properties are continuous to form the element weighting coecient matrix and element force vector. The discretized element weighting coecient matrices and element force vectors are assembled together to form the global weighting coecient matrix and global force vector for the whole plate using connection conditions. The solution for the entire plate is obtained by solving the ®nal algebraic equation system. Detailed formulations and numerical procedures are presented and the convergence characteristics of the method are investigated. The numerical results are then compared, where possible, with the analytical solutions to verify the present solutions. Consequently, some new numerical results are computed and analyzed using the present numerical method for laminated rectangular plates with di€erent boundary conditions, which are not solvable directly by the global DQ method.