Study of Round Central Hole in Buckling Analysis of Cross Ply Laminates

Laminated structures find many applications in various engineering fields namely aerospace, bio-medical, civil, marine and mechanical engineering due to easy handling, good mechanical properties and low fabrication cost. Laminated plates with round holes and other openings are extensively used as structural members in aircraft design. These holes are act sometimes as access holes, holes for hardware to pass through, or in the case of fuselage, windows and doors or simply used to reduce the weight of the structure. These laminated structures are often subjected to load in one or more direction in cycles or as intermittent load. Thus there is need to study the failure of these components under bi-axial loading with the view to optimize the shape and lay of the components so as they give maximum service and more life. In this paper bi-axial testing machine is developed to determine bucking load of different materials. Experiments are carried out on cross ply composite under various buckling loads on the bi-axial testing machine. The theoretical results, analytical and experimental results are compared with each other. It is observed that the strength of Bakelite composite plates is higher than glass epoxy laminated composite plate. So Bakelite is more suitable than glass epoxy.