Abstract: Composite materials used in automotive body lightweight design have been paid on more and more attention. In order to further improve the numerical accuracy for dynamic analysis of automotive structure made from composite materials, the paper presents a smoothing strategy to conduct laminated shell element which is used into dynamic characteristics analysis of composite structural components. By the proposed smoothing strategy, the shear locking is successfully alleviated using the discrete shear gap method and the system stiffness matrix is effectively tuned after employing the gradient smoothing technique aiming to avoid the “over-stiff” phenomenon. Both typical automotive components such as engine cover and door made from composite materials are performed in dynamic characteristics analysis, and the accuracy of the obtained results is compared with existing finite element commercial software. The results from both typical engineering examples show that the proposed smoothing strategy makes the computational results be higher accuracy.

Key words: smoothing strategy, laminated plate and shell, automotive structures, composite material, dynamic characteristics