A numerical approach for limit analysis of orthotropic composite laminates

A numerical approach for limit analysis of structures whose constituent material exhibits orthotropic behaviour is presented and discussed. Attention is focused on orthotropic composite laminates under plane stress conditions. The proposed approach is an extension, in the context of orthotropic materials, of the linear matching method (LMM). The latter is based on a sequence of linear analyses performed on the analysed structure made of a fictitious linear viscous material with spatially varying moduli. Here the LMM is applied to structures made of materials obeying the Tsai–Wu criterion. An appropriate choice of the fictitious material, which in this case is assumed linear, viscous, orthotropic and suffering a distribution of assigned initial stresses, reduces the number of parameters to be spatially varied thus rendering the whole procedure applicable and reliable. The results obtained are highly promising as witnessed by a number of numerical examples which are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Copyright q 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.