Thermal Vibration of Composites and Sandwich Laminates Using Refined Higher Order Zigzag Theory

Vibration of laminated composite and sandwich plate under thermal loading is studied in this paper. A refined higher order theory has been used for the purpose. In order to avoid stress oscillations observed in the implementation of a displacement based finite element, the stress field derived from temperature (initial strains) have been made consistent with total strain field. So far no study has been reported in literature on the thermal vibration problem based on the refined higher order theory using a FE model. Numerical results are presented for thermal vibration problems to study the influence of boundary conditions, ply orientation and plate geometry on the natural frequencies of these structures.