المجلة الدولية للعلوم والتقنية

In general, a plate structures may be defined as plane structural elements with a small thickness compared to the planar dimensions. Application of plates is very widespread in engineering such as containers, aircraft fuselages, submarine hulls, deck structures, walls, and raft foundations. Plates can be formed by isotropic, orthotropic materials, or laminated composites materials. The development of laminated composite materials extends the application field of plates; the analysis of laminated composite plates subjected to static or dynamic loads have received widespread attention in recent years. Geometrically, plates are bounded either by straight or curved boundaries. The static or dynamic loads carried by plates are predominantly perpendicular to the plate faces. Plates might be classified as a thick or thin plate. Thin plates are initially flat structural members bounded by two parallel planes, called faces, and a cylindrical surface, called an edge or boundary. The generators of the cylindrical surface are perpendicular to the plane faces. The distance between the plane faces is called the thickness (h) of the plate. The plate thickness is very small compared with other characteristic dimensions of the faces (length, width, diameter, etc.). In the present study; the performance of isotropic/ orthotropic rectangular thin plates under uniform distributed loads and various boundary conditions is investigated. Three-dimensional extended finite element method (X-FEM) is developed and implemented in the ABAQUS-CAE package to predict deflection, bending and twisting moments, and stresses, for plates with immovable edges and simply supported, partially or fully clamped edge conditions have been considered. The variations of Poisson’s ratio as well as the thickness to the length ratio are carried out. The results that have been obtained numerically, evaluated and compared to the analytical solutions.