Asymptotic construction of Reissner-like composite plate theory with accurate strain recovery

The focus of this paper is to develop an asymptotically correct theory for composite laminated plates when each lamina exhibits monoclinic material symmetry. The development starts with formulation of the three-dimensional (3- D), anisotropic elasticity problem in which the deformation of the reference surface is expressed in terms of intrinsic two-dimensional (2-D) variables. The variational asymptotic method is then used to rigorously split this 3-D problem into a linear one-dimensional normal-line analysis and a nonlinear 2-D plate analysis accounting for classical as well as transverse shear deformation. The normal-line analysis provides a constitutive law between the generalized, 2-D strains and stress resultants as well as recovering relations to approximately but accurately express the 3-D displacement, strain and stress fields in terms of plate variables calculated in the plate analysis. It is known that more than one theory may exist that is asymptotically correct to a given order. This nonuniqueness is used to cast a strain energy functional that is asymptotically correct through the second order into a simple ‘‘Reissner-like’’ plate theory. Although it is not possible in general to construct an asymptotically correct Reissner-like composite plate theory, an optimization procedure is used to drive the present theory as close to being asymptotically correct as possible while maintaining the beauty of the Reissner-like formulation. Numerical results are presented to compare with the exact solution as well as a previous similar yet very different theory. The present theory has excellent agreement with the previous theory and exact results.