Investigation of delamination effect on nonlinear vibration behaviors of a composite plate resting on nonlinear elastic foundation

Abstract The aim of the present work is to investigate the delamination effect on nonlinear vibration behaviors of composite plate resting on nonlinear elastic foundation. The composite plate is assumed to be pre-delaminated with various delamination locations and modeled with an improved layerwise theory and finite element method . The delamination is simulated by the Heaviside unit step function allowing for the discontinuity of displacement fields. By means of the variational principle, the nonlinear governing equations can be obtained and further solved by the direct iterative method. The model takes into account three foundation parameters so as to investigate their effect on the nonlinear vibration characteristics. Three longitudinal locations and three interfacial locations are considered, and both clamped-free and clamped–clamped boundary conditions are considered to investigate the nonlinear vibration behaviors. The results show that different from the linear vibration, with the existence of delamination, the nonlinear fundamental frequencies may exceed the fundamental frequency of the healthy plate when the vibration amplitude ratio reaches a certain value. This finding may help engineers understand the nonlinear vibration behaviors and further detect the delamination in composite plate resting on nonlinear foundations in presence of delamination.