Analysis of thermal effect on buckling of imperfect FG composite plates by adaptive XIGA

Abstract

This paper presents an effective computational framework based on adaptive extended isogeometric analysis (XIGA) for analyzing thermal buckling stability behavior of functional graded plates (FGPs) with flaws (e.g., holes, cracks). In this model, the locally refined non-uniform rational B-splines (LR NURBS), which can exactly represent the structure geometry and carry out the local refinement of the mesh, are used as the basis functions; and the first-order shear deformation theory is adopted to describe the kinematics of plates. According to the enhanced stresses on the mid-plane under the first critical buckling mode, a posteriori error estimator is evaluated. In addition, based on the posteriori error estimator, the meshes are automatically locally refined through refining the basis functions with large error. The obtained results illustrate the accuracy and reliability of the developed method, and show that the adaptive local refinement has better convergence ratio and higher computational efficiency than those of the uniform global refinement. Addressing the influence of some numerical aspects such as gradient index, direction and location of crack, and hole size on the critical thermal buckling temperature is also given.