Keywords: anisotropic beams, fiber orientation, coefficients of mutual influence, computer added engineering.

The study of mechanical behavior and of the constitutive relations is very important in scope of structural engineering. Many materials used as structural components, in diverse areas of engineering, are not isotropic, for example, fiber-reinforced polymer materials or wood. Searching for a contribution to the application of these anisotropic materials, this paper deals with a theoretical study on anisotropy and on its influence in the stress distribution and displacements in plane laminate beams. Anisotropic beams are a body with a mechanical behavior that is dependent on the direction of its fibers. Due to simplifications in analysis, anisotropic beams are generally treated as linear orthotropic, with the material directions ideally coincident with the longitudinal and transverse directions of a coordinate system associated with the structural member. When such coincidence does not occur in the practical cases, the effects on the mechanical properties require a transformation of coordinates of the elastic coefficients to adjust them to the adopted model for structural analysis. Thus, additional terms appear in the constitutive model of the material of an anisotropic body. By introducing these coefficients to the elastic model, a study of the stresses and displacements in beams was developed by applying an analytical method and a commercial finite element program. Numerical examples confirm that the fiber orientation, even for small angles, has a considerable influence on displacements in the anisotropic beams. The obtained results reveal also that there is a non-symmetrical normal and shear stress distribution in the beams.

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