Vibration of thin-walled laminated composite beams having open and closed sections

An efficient technique based on one dimensional beam finite element analysis for vibration of thin-walled laminated composite beams having open and closed sections is proposed in this paper. The developed technique is quite generic which can accommodate any stacking sequence of individual walls and considers all possible couplings between different modes of deformation. The formulation has accommodated the effect of transverse shear deformation of walls as well as out of plane warping of the beam section where the warping can be restrained or released. The inclusion of shear deformation has imposed a problem in the finite element formulation of the beam which is solved successfully utilising a concept developed by one of the authors. A number of numerical examples of open section (I and C sections) beams and closed section box beams are solved by the proposed technique and the results predicted by the proposed model are compared with those obtained from literature as well as detailed finite element analysis using a commercial code. The results show a very good performance of the proposed modelling technique.