Application of the Bending-Gradient theory to laminated plates

This work presents the application to laminated plates of a new plate theory for outof- plane loaded thick plates where the static unknowns are those of the Kirchhoff-Love theory, to which six components are added representing the gradient of the bending moment. The Bending-Gradient theory is an extension to arbitrarily layered plates of the Reissner- Mindlin theory which appears as a special case when the plate is homogeneous. The new theory is applied to multilayered plates and its predictions are compared to full 3D Pagano (1969)'s exact solutions and other approaches. It gives good predictions of both deflection, shear stress distributions and in-plane displacement distribution in many material configuration.