Abstract
Thin laminated composite plates are vulnerable to buckling under high compressive axial load due to small thickness. These plates may exhibit considerable variation in their behavior due to inherent uncertainties involved in various material and load parameters. Keeping these uncertainties in view, in the present paper an effort has been made to present a simple procedure for reliability assessment of thin antisymmetric composite laminated plates against buckling. For this purpose, limit state functions have been derived for antisymmetric cross ply and angle ply laminated plates considering buckling as serviceability failure criterion. Using these limit state functions and employing First Order Reliability Method (FORM), reliability has been computed in terms of reliability index. To study the influence of various random variables, employed in the limit state functions, sensitivity analysis has been carried out. Effect of number of layers, effect of fiber orientation, effect of longitudinal modulus, effect of transverse modulus on plate reliability have also been studied on parametric basis.