Determination of mechanical constants of unidirectional glass/epoxy composite plates by using modal test

The goal in this paper is to determine the mechanicalproperties of unidirectional thin and thick glass/epoxycomposite plates by using vibrational analysis and also aninverse method. Four thick and thin composite plates withdifferent arrangement of fibers and also dimensions areinvestigated in the present study. Natural frequencies ofthese plates are obtained in the modal laboratory withdifferent boundary condition. In this study, that is a kind oftheory/experimental method, mechanical properties ofplates have been obtained by a code in MATLAB softwarethat is combination of FEM method and PSO optimizationalgorithm. Error function in this study is considered as sumof squared difference between experimental and numericalfrequencies. To enhance validation of the presented paper,results of tensile test have been compared with the presentstudy. The results obtained for mechanical properties ofthese plates indicate high accuracy of presented method.

Keywords:

Mechanical Constants , Composite Plates , Vibration Analysis , Optimization , FEM