A refined model for laminated beams. Part I:A new high-order approach

This paper presents a new displacement-based one-dimensional model for the analysis of multilayered composite beams. The kinematic restriction of cross sections rigid in their own planes is introduced. The axial displacements over the cross sections are represented in terms of explicitly defined piecewise polynomial warping functions with discontinuous derivatives at the interlaminae, whereas the amplitude of the displacements along the beam axis is established by means of a variational formulation. It is proved that the proposed representation of the axial displacements yields the exact solution of the interior domain problem for a beam subjected to a transverse load varying according to a polynomial law. It is shown that two or three coordinate functions are sufficient to yield continuous distributions of equilibrated stresses except for small neighborhoods of the constrained cross sections, where a higher number of warping functions could be used in order to obtain a better accuracy. The numerical results show excellent agreement with plane stress finite element and plane strain exact solutions.