Buckling analysis of rotationally periodic laminated composite shells by a new multilayered shell element

In this paper a new finite element (FE) with relative degrees-of-freedom (DOF) is developed for modeling composite shells with arbitrary number of layers. With this shell element, satisfactory resolution can be ensured even if a relatively coarse FE mesh is employed. Moreover, this element can be easily connected with other solid type elements. All of these features enable its promising application in the simulation of modern composite structures, for example the buckling analysis of rotationally periodic laminated composite shells. For this kind of problem, a computational strategy that consists of the rotationally periodic FE method and this new shell element is adopted in this paper. The efficiency and accuracy of this proposed computational strategy are illustrated by two benchmarks as well as an implementation to a large scale practical structure.