Lateral Buckling Analysis of Composite Cantilevers with Square Hole using the Finite Element Method

The influences of hole dimension and position on the lateral buckling behaviour of woven fabric laminated composite cantilever beams having a square hole were investigated. Firstly, the theoretical, experimental and numerical characteristics of critical buckling loads of the beams without holes were investigated and compared with each other. It was shown that there is a good agreement among the theoretical, experimental and numerical results. The ANSYS finite element program was used for the numerical analyses. Furthermore, the numerical analyses of some models with various hole dimensions, different layer thicknesses, square shapes and fiber directions were performed by changing the distance between the hole. It is concluded for a square hole that the increase of the hole dimensions causes decrease of critical lateral buckling loads.