Vibration of a Laminated Beam with a Delamination Including Contact Effects

Certain results are presented in this paper on damped vibration of a laminated cantilever beam with a single closing delamination. In order to investigate this task the finite element method has been applied in the current study. For modelling the beam higher order shear deformation beam finite elements have been used. The vibration of the beam is investigated in the time domain using a dynamic contact algorithm developed by the authors. The algorithm is based on the Newmark method and also incorporates a Newton-Raphson based procedure for resolving the equation of motion. The time series obtained from solving the equation of motion have been subsequently analysed in the frequency domain by using FFT (Fast Fourier Transform). The vibration responses of the beam due to various harmonic and impulse excitations, at different delamination locations, and for different delamination lengths, as well as changes in the dissipation of damping energy due to the delamination, have all been considered in the paper