Free vibration analysis of industry-driven woven fiber laminated carbon/epoxy composite beams by experimental and numerical approach

The free vibration study of industry-driven woven fibre laminated carbon/epoxy composite beam is addressed through experimental and numerical modal analysis in the present research work. The experimental modal analysis is performed using the vibration Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analyser and the natural frequencies are realized in the PULSE environment. A linear beam model is simulated in ABAQUS finite element (FE) software, adopting a solid deformable 8-nodded element with five degrees of freedom (DOF) per node from the ABAQUS library for numerical computation of natural frequencies. A satisfactory agreement is achieved between the experimental and numerical results. The effects of ply-orientation, number of plies, lamination scheme and aspect ratios with different boundary conditions on the natural frequencies are studied. The results confirmed that the predicted vibration characteristics of laminated composite beams are sensitive to the adopted parameters for the investigation. The present study will help to understand the dynamic behaviour for laminated composite beams and serve as an experimental benchmark result within the frequency domain.