Analysis of mixed finite elements for laminated composite plates Original Research Article

The approximation to the solution of a laminated plate problem is considered. The main result consists in proving that a performant scheme can be obtained by simply coupling a standard membrane element for the in-plane displacements with a robust method for plate bending problem, both elements related to the case of homogeneous material. A rigorous convergence analysis is developed for the case of clamped boundary conditions. Numerical results are presented, showing the accordance between the theoretical results and the actual computations.