A model of composite laminated Reddy beam based on a modified couple-stress theory

In this paper, a new anisotropic constitutive relation based on a modified couple-stress theory is defined for composite laminated Reddy beam. The theory contains only one material length-scale parameter in each ply of the composite laminated beam. The example of a cross-ply simply supported beam subjected to transverse load q0sin(πx/L) is presented. Numerical results show that the proposed beam model can capture the scale effect of the microstructure. The proposed model can be reduced to several models of the modified couple-stress theory by adopting the assumptions in Timoshenko beam, Bernoulli–Euler beam and material isotropy. It can be seen that the deflections and stresses obtained by the proposed beam model are smaller than those based on Timoshenko and Bernoulli–Euler beam assumptions.