Experimental Investigation on Buckling Analysis of Woven Glass Fiber/Epoxy Laminated Composite Materials

The structural components made from the composite materials possess outstanding advantages like reliable mechanical properties, durability, and good corrosion resistance, and low density. They also exhibit high impact resistance and good damage tolerance. These merits of composite structures draw the attention of scientists, engineers and researchers in generally the stability of composite structures is verified by carrying out buckling analysis. The aircraft components are made up of laminated composite plates are subjected to buckling analysis, in order to confirm whether the component withstand the critical in plane loads. Composite structural plates provided with circular cut out, square cut out and rectangular cut-out are widely used as structural members in aircraft and vehicle design. The different holes are provided in these members can be access holes, pass-through holes for any hardware or holes for windows and doors. Sometimes these holes are produced for weight reduction in the composite structural components. In this present study, buckling experiments were carried out on Epoxy/woven glass fiber laminated composite plate specimens and the influence of different cut-out shapes like circular, square and rectangle are examined and determined experimentally. Boundary conditions free and clamped were considered for all the experiments. After the buckling experiments, comparisons were made between these two test results. These results show the effect of various cut-out shapes on the buckling load.