Experimental and numerical study on dynamic behavior of composite beams with different cross section

Abstract

The increasing use of composite materials across various fields such as aerospace, automotive, civil, naval and other high performance engineering applications are due to their light weight, high specific strength and stiffness, excellent thermal characteristic, ease in fabrication and other significant attributes. The present study deals with experimental investigation on free vibration of laminated composite beam and compared with the numerical predictions using finite element method (FEM) in ANSYS environment. A program is also developed in MATLAB environment to study effects of different parameters. The scope of the present work is to investigate and understand the effect of different parameters including cross sectional shape on modal parameters like modal frequency, mode shapes. Experimental investigation is carried out by Impulsive frequency response test under fixed- free and fixed-fixed boundary conditions. Composites Beams are fabricated using woven glass fabric and epoxy by hand layup technique. Modal analysis of various cross sectional beams were reported, compared and discussed. The finite element modelling has been done by using ANSYS 14 and compared with the experimental results. Two-node, finite elements of three degrees of freedom per node and rectangular section are presented for the free vibration analysis of the laminated composite beams in this work. The effects of different parameters including ply orientation, number of layers, effect of the length of the beam and various boundary conditions of the laminated composite beams are discussed