Evaluation of transverse shear stresses in layered beams/plates/shells via stress recovery accounting for various CUF-based theories

This paper exploits the stress recovery technique to evaluate the out-of-plane stress components in the static analysis of composite beams, plates and shells. This technique is implemented in the framework of the Carrera Unified Formulation, an approach allowing the implementation of the theories of structures in a compact way. This work uses Taylor, Legendre and Jacobi polynomials with equivalent single-layer and layer-wise approaches. The finite element method is applied to provide numerical solutions. Multi-layered beams, plates and shells subjected to different loading and boundary conditions are studied to validate and assess the proposed technique. The results are compared with those from the literature and show that the stress recovery technique provides reasonable accuracy for the shear stresses, even with lower-order models. Furthermore, results confirm that, when dealing with thick structures, the adoption of layer-wise models is mandatory to obtain accurate results.