Abstract—In many structures like high speed machineries, aircrafts and light weight structures composite beams and beam like structures are main constituent elements. Cracks induced in these structural elements cause serious failure and monitoring of these cracks is essential. The presence of these cracks influences the dynamic characteristics of the structural elements. The influence of cracks on dynamic characteristics like natural frequencies, modes of vibration of structures, buckling loads has been the subject of many investigations. However studies related to behaviour of composite cracked structures subject to in-plane loads are scarce in literature. Hence the changes in buckling behaviour have been the subject of interest of many investigations. Present work deals with the buckling analysis of a cantilever beam made from graphite fiber reinforced polyimide with a transverse one-edge non-propagating open crack using ANSYS 14.5. The effects of various parameters like crack location, crack depth and fibers orientations upon the changes of the buckling loads of the beam are studied. The results obtained are analyzed. The static buckling load of a cracked composite beam is found to be decreasing with the presence of a crack and the decrease is more severe with increase in crack depth for any location of the crack. Furthermore, the buckling load of the beam decreased with increase in angle of the fibres and is maximum at 0 degree orientation. Next comparison of buckling loads of two different beams are done and analysed and found that buckling loads of two beams in both cracked and non cracked conditions decrease with increase in fibre angle but by comparing both cases, it is clearly understood that rate of change of buckling loads of graphite fiber reinforced polymide is more compared to E-glass fiber reinforced polymide.

Index Terms—ANSYS, Crack, Fibre-reinforced composite beams, Modal analysis, Natural frequency, Static buckling

Cite: L Santosh Sreekanth and M Kumaraswamy, "Buckling Analysis of Fibre Reinforced Composite Beam with a Transverse Crack," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 306-314, January 2015.