An Enhancement of the Warping Shear Functions of Refined Zigzag Theory

The paper presents an enhancement in Refined Zigzag Theory (RZT) for the analysis of multilayered composite plates. In standard RZT, the zigzag functions cannot predict the coupling effect of in-plane displacements for anisotropic multilayered plates, such as angle-ply laminates. From a computational point of view, this undesirable effect leads to a singular stiffness matrix. In this work, the local kinematic field of RZT is enhanced with the other two zigzag functions that allow the coupling effect. In order to assess the accuracy of these new zigzag functions for RZT, results obtained from bending of angle-ply laminated plates are compared with the three-dimensional exact elasticity solutions and other plate models used in the open literature. The numerical results highlight that the enhanced zigzag functions extend the range of applicability of RZT to the study of general angle-ply multilayered structures, maintaining the same seven kinematic unknowns of standard RZT.