VIBRATION OF THIN SKEW FIBRE REINFORCED COMPOSITE LAMINATES

Skew fibre reinforced composite laminates are important structural elements in modern engineering structures, particularly in the aerospace industry. The natural frequencies of these skew laminates are of primary significance to structural designers. As far as the author's knowledge is concerned, the references on this topic are very limited. In this paper a B-spline Rayleigh-Ritz method (RRM) is presented for free vibration analysis of thin skew fibre reinforced composite laminates which may have arbitrary lay-ups, admitting the possibility of coupling between in-plane and out-of-plane behaviour and general anisotropy. Various numerical applications are presented, and the method is shown to be accurate and efficient.