Analysis of symmetrically laminated folded plate structures using the meshfree galerkin method

A meshfree Galerkin method that is based on the first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT) is developed in this paper to study the flexure behavior of folded symmetrically laminated plate structures. The mature meshfree model that was established by the authors for the stability analysis of folded isotropic plate structures is extended to simulate folded laminated plate structures. The feature of this model is its consideration of a folded laminated plate as an assembly of laminates and its ability to study the laminates separately with the meshfree Galerkin method before the entire folded plate. The stiffness matrices of the laminates are first derived by the meshfree method. They are then superposed to produce the global stiffness matrix of the folded plate. The superposition process is realized by treating every laminate as a super element and accumulating their stiffness matrices one by one as in the finite element methods (FEM). By taking advantage of the meshfree characteristics, no mesh is required to determine the stiffness matrices of the laminates in this paper. Hence the troublesome remeshing is removed completely from the study of such problems as the large deformation or crack propagation of folded laminated plates. The convergence and accuracy of the proposed method are examined by computing several numerical examples, and good agreement is observed between the present results and those that are given by ANSYS.