An improved theory of laminated Reissner-Mindlin plates

Theories of laminated plates have been proposed that, although they lead to different plate equations, are based as ours on the assumptions that the three-dimensional deformation of each layer is of Reissner-Mindlin type and that displacement and traction vectors are continuous across layer interfaces. The distinctive feature of our present theory is that reactive stresses are associated with the internal constraints implicit in the assumed kinematics, and exploited to obtain an improved evaluation of the stress field in the three-dimensional layered body for which we propose a two-dimensional model. Application to equilibrium problems for rectangular and circular plates gives results that are in good agreement with the exact three-dimensional solutions of Levinson type we derived in a companion paper.