A new analytical solution for elastic flexure of thick multi-layered composite hybrid plates resting on Winkler elastic foundation in air and water

A new analytical flexural solution based on double finite integral Fourier transform and trigonometric series differentiation procedures was developed for thick multi-layered composite hybrid rectangular plates resting on Winkler elastic foundation in air and water. The effect of material anisotropy, coupled hydro-mechanical loads, and underwater floor inclination angle,which were overlooked in the literature, is considered in this study. Furthermore, the predetermination of the shape deformation function is not required in our proposed analytical solution, which offers more accurate results. For the particular cases where the plate made of isotropic material is in air, the analytical results are compared with, and verified by the literature. Literature is lacking to investigate thick multi-layered composite hybrid rectangular plates with free edges and under hydro-mechanical load; hence our analytical results are compared with, and verified by,numerical analysis employing finite element method (FEM). The analytical results provide excellent agreement with both literature and the proposed FEM. FEM is shown to be time-intensive since the results converge after 60 seconds runtime with definition of 12159 elements during mesh refinement, yet the proposed analytical method demonstrates that the convergence can easily be achieved after 5 seconds runtime through selecting small values for Fourier terms.