THIN-WALLED LAMINATED COMPOSITE CYLINDRICAL TUBES: PART II - BENDING ANALYSIS.

A beam-type stiffness matrix for thin-walled filamentary wound laminated composite tubes of any layup is derived. This beam-type stiffness matrix has degrees of freedom that are consistent with stiffness matrices used in classical matrix analysis of structures and it is numerically constructed from results of two-point boundary value problems using Donnell's shell theory. Using this stiffness matrix, numerical results are obtained for the deflections of a simply supported composite tube loaded at its center. It is noted that for certain layups the beam theory approach using a longitudinal equivalent Young's modulus tends to mask fundamental characteristics that govern the static response of laminated composite tubes.