Computational study on compressive instability of composite plates with off-center delaminations

A layerwise theory within the framework of first-order shear deformation theory is introduced to investigate the postbuckling behavior and the delamination growth of geometrically imperfect composite plates. The Ritz method is adopted and the displacement fields are assumed in a form of polynomial series leading to a reduced computational cost. The proposed method is capable of predicting both the local buckling of the delaminated sublaminates...