Multipatch discontinuous Galerkin isogeometric analysis of composite laminates

This paper is concerned with the isogeometric analysis (IGA) of composite laminates under cylindrical bending. Non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS) are employed as basis functions for both geometric and computational implementations. In order to account for multiple domains, each lamina is modeled as a single NURBS patch. This multipatch representation corresponds to decomposition of the computational domain (composite laminate) into non-overlapping subdomains. As NURBS patches are discontinuous across their boundaries, a standard FEA-like procedure does not work for multipatch IGA; an additional numerical technique is required for coupling NURBS patches. Therefore, in this paper, one of the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods, namely symmetric interior penalty Galerkin formulation, is employed to allow for discontinuities. For numerical calculations, a composite laminate with stacking sequences \(0^{\circ }{/}90^{\circ }\) and \(0^{\circ }{/}90^{\circ }{/}0^{\circ }\), respectively, is adopted. The stresses are calculated along the thickness of the composite laminate, subjected to a sinusoidal load, and they are compared with the analytical solutions. It is shown that DG–IGA gives a better approximation in comparison with the standard IGA.