Many useful thin-walled structures such as aircraft and automatic parts, rocket casings, helicopter blades, and a variety of containment vessels, are constructed of layers of anisotropic, filament or fiber-reinforced materials. While many of these structures are subject to severe mechanical, inertial, or thermal loads, they must often be designed to remain elastic. This means that it is particularly important to be able to compute accurately global characteristics, such as buckling loads and natural frequencies, as well as local information such as stresses near holes or edges. It is proposed to study two important, complementary regions of such structures, namely, the interior where there are no steep stress gradients, and the edge zone(s) where stress gradients are high. For both regions, simplified, cost-effective asymptotic methods will be developed. The scope of the investigation will include both linear and nonlinear problems. It is known that considerations of nonlinear effects in composites often lead to striking differences from predictions of linearized theories. In view of the rapid utilization of advanced composite materials in current technology, studies on large deformations of such materials promise to have widespread impact on the knowledge and technology base.
