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J.N. Reddy to Deliver College Distinguished Lecture

J.N. Reddy, Distinguished Professor and Oscar S. Endowed Chair from the Department of Mechanical and Engineering at Texas A&M University, will deliver a College Distinguished Lecture on "Nonlinear Analysis of Laminated Composite Structures Using a Refined Shell Finite Element."

The lecture will take place at 1:30 p.m., Friday, March 27, in Room G-102 of the Engineering Sciences Building.

Dr. Reddy is the author of more than 360 journal papers and 16 textbooks on theoretical formulations and finite-element analysis of problems in solid and structural mechanics (plates and shells), composite materials, computational fluid dynamics, numerical heat transfer, and applied mathematics.

He has delivered more than 80 keynote and plenary lectures at international conferences, and advised 20 postdoctoral fellows, 50 Ph.D. students, and 35 M.S. students. He has received numerous awards and is a fellow of ASME, ASCE, AIAA, IACM, USACM, ASC, and AAM.

The abstract for the lecture follows:

A shell finite element for the nonlinear analysis of laminated shell structures and through-thickness functionally graded shells will be presented. A first-order shell theory with seven parameters is derived with exact nonlinear deformations and under the framework of the Lagrangian description.

This approach takes into account shell thickness changes and, therefore, 3D constitutive equations are utilized. A tensor-based finite element formulation is used to describe the deformation and constitutive laws of a shell in a natural and simple way by using curvilinear coordinates.

In addition, a family of high-order elements with Lagrangian interpolations is used to avoid membrane and shear locking; no mixed interpolations are employed. Numerical comparisons of the present results with those found in the literature for typical benchmark problems involving isotropic and laminated composite plates and shells as well as functionally graded plates and shells are found to be excellent.

These results show the validity of the developed finite element model. Moreover, the simplicity of this approach makes it attractive for applications in contact mechanics and damage propagation in shells.

03/23/2009