DISPLACEMENT POTENTIAL SOLUTION TO ELASTIC FIELD IN A STIFFENED CANTILEVER OF LAMINATED COMPOSITE A. M. Afsar 1 , N. M. L. Huq 2 , and J. I. Song 1 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Changwon National University, Changwon 641-773, Korea 2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, DUET, Gazipur 1700, Bangladesh mdafsarali1967@yahoo.com SUMMARY The mixed boundary value elasticity problem of a stiffened cantilever of laminated composite is formulated in terms of a single displacement potential function. This reduces the problem to the solution of a single fourth order partial differential equation. Analytical solution is presented for a glass/epoxy cantilever under a tip load. Keywords: Mixed boundary condition, Analytical solution, Displacement potential approach, Elastic field, Cantilever, Laminated composite INTRODUCTION It is now well known that composite materials are superior to conventional monolithic materials in many respects. In particular, these materials possess superior mechanical properties, such as specific strength and stiffness, superior physical property, such as specific density, and superior thermal property, such as minimized coefficient of thermal expansion. As a result, these materials are being widely used in modern structural elements to exhibit better characteristics. However, the characteristics of a structural element are dependent on both the geometry of the element and boundary conditions experienced by the element. Therefore, for a particular application, a structural element should be properly analyzed in order to understand, quantify, and improve the characteristics satisfying all the necessary boundary conditions to the desired level of accuracy. Elastic behavior is one of the important issues that should be paid attention to understand the stress and displacement fields. This necessitates a suitable analysis method that is capable of dealing with any boundary conditions. Airy stress function approach can be used to obtain analytical solution only for some idealized two dimensional problems when boundary conditions are prescribed in terms of stresses only. This approach appears to be inadequate for the problems when the boundary conditions are prescribed in terms of displacement or strain. Displacement boundary conditions can be treated if the problems are formulated in terms of displacement parameters [1]. However, this involves two major difficulties. Firstly, formulations of two dimensional elasticity problems in terms of displacement parameters yields two simultaneous second order partial differential equations which are