Three-dimensional multi-patch isogeometric analysis of composite laminates with a discontinuous Galerkin approach*

In this study, a three-dimensional discontinuous Galerkin isogeometric analysis framework is presented for the analysis of composite laminates. Non-uniform rational B-splines are employed as basis functions for both geometric and computational implementations. From a practical point of view, modeling with multiple non-uniform rational B-spline patches is required in many different applications due to the complexity of computational domains. Then, a special numerical technique is necessary to couple different non-uniform rational B-spline patches to carry out the isogeometric analysis. In this study, therefore, one of the discontinuous Galerkin methods, namely, symmetric interior penalty Galerkin formulation is utilized to deal with multi-patch isogeometric analysis applications. In order to show the applicability of the proposed framework, composite laminates under sinusoidally distributed load with different stacking sequences are studied in the numerical examples. The predicted results are compared with those obtained by the three-dimensional elasticity solutions and various numerical models available in the literature.