NUMERICAL STUDIES ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF TRANSVERSE LOAD IN ORTHOTROPIC PLATES

Abstract

The utilisation of laminated composites has been growing rapidly in the construction industry for the past few decades because of their properties like high strength to weight ratio, high stiffness to weight ratio, and corrosion-resistant. Most of the existing bridges are facing the major problem of corrosion of their bridge decks. So there is a need for rehabilitation or replacement of these bridge decks to meet the increased design requirements. These laminated composites can be utilised as bridge decks. Fiber-reinforced laminated composites will be a good alternative for replacing bridge decks or constructing new bridge decks. But there are no proper design standards or specifications available to design the laminated composites. There is a need to develop a database that can be utilised to design laminated composites. In this thesis work, an attempt is made to generate the database related to patch load distribution in laminated composites. The various numerical studies have been performed using ANSYS 19.2 software, and the distribution of moments with varying orthotropy ratios has been studied. The multiplication factors based on the orthotropy ratio have been generated to find moments in the laminated composite panel using the pigeauds curve. The various numerical studies are performed on the skew laminated plate also. The behavior of the skew plate with varying skew angle and the effect of orthotropy ratio on the skew laminated plate has been studied, and the results are plotted.