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On the demand of using laminated composite plates in a variety of engineering fields, the applictLtion of composite materials have seen rapid advancements in a wide ' range of fields, prorriinently in aerospace and shipbuilding. The focus of the aircraft and ship building industries has always been on building faster crafts with no compromise on strength and other design parameters. Therefore, three-dimensional analysis was found to be essential to predict the inter-laminar stresses to avoid over designing and delamination betWeen layers. The main contribution of the present investigation is to develop a new threedimensional finite strip method (FSM) to solve the laminated orthotropic material problem. This new method is a successful combination of the classical FSM and'the state space method. The method guarantees continuous fields of both displacements and inter-laminar stresses across interfaces between layers, which is one of the obstacles for applying the conventional finite element method. Besides, it can replace ~e full traditional finite;:lement solutions in structures that have regular geometric pians and simple boundary conditions. This can be accomplished without losing the versatility of the finite element method. It is the first time in literature to introduce' finite strip method in a three-dimensional analysis. Another contribution is to extend and modify the solution to be able to deal with more complex boundary conditions. The state space approach was combined with the S-pline FSM rather than the traditional FSM to deal with more boundary conditions cases and make it more general in introducing different boundary conditions along the strips ends. The new theory was first established and tested numerically for orthotropic materials. Using S-pline finite strip method in the threedimensional analysis is believed to be new in the literature. The final contribution of this work is to apply the three-dimensional S-pline FSM to solve the problems. involving angle--plied laminated plates rather than just dealing with orthotropic materials. Furthermore, it is believed to be the first time to use a three-dimensional S-pline FSM to solve an angle-ply plate problem.

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