A stress recovery procedure for laminated composite plates based on strong-form equilibrium enforced via the RBF Kansa method

Often the employment of the full potentialities of laminated composite materials is restrained by the scarceness of cost-effective simulation strategies in the design stage. Albeit cheap modelling techniques exist, they typically prove ineffective in retrieving interlaminar stresses, the first responsible for the damage of laminates. In this paper, we propose a strategy to reconstruct the out-of-plane stress components in composite laminates, post-processing FEM data obtained with coarse models simplified according to the classical theory of laminates. The described approach relies on radial basis function interpolation and Kansa method to enforce equilibrium in strong form, within a meshless approach. The obtained results successfully compare with those from complete layup modeling for test cases where an analytical solution is available.