The high stress concentration at the edge of a non-circular shaped cutout is of practical importance in designing of the engineering structures. These types of cutout usually are evaluated either experimentally or numerically. In this paper an attempt is made to formulate a simple analytical method for stress analysis in perforated composite plates with non-circular cutouts. The stress concentration of isotropic and composite perforated plates with variety of centrally located non-circular cutout was investigated. Numerical evaluation using commercial finite element code, were conducted to evaluate the analytical results. Parametric studies were conducted to investigate the effects of variation in cutout shape, bluntness, and material properties on the location and the value of the maximum stress in plates subjected to uni-axial tension load. The results presented herein, indicated that the maximum stress in perforated isotropic/composite plates can be significantly change by using proper material properties, cutout shapes and bluntness.

Keywords