Determination of thermoelastic stress wave propagation in nanocomposite sandwich plates reinforced by clusters of carbon nanotubes

Abstract

Adding small amounts of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) into the face sheets of sandwich structures can significantly improve their thermo-mechanical responses. However, the formation of CNT clusters, especially at high volume fractions of CNTs, dramatically affects the mechanical properties of the resulted nanocomposites, which is usually ignored. In this paper, by considering the formation of CNT clusters, we have investigated transient heat transfer and stress wave propagation in polymeric sandwich plates with two nanocomposite face sheets. The face sheets were made of clusters of CNTs embedded in a polymeric matrix. The volume fractions of CNTs and their clusters were assumed to be functionally graded along the thickness of face sheets. The proposed sandwich plate was subjected to thermal and impact pressure loads. Eshelby–Mori–Tanaka’s approach was applied to evaluate the material properties of the resulted nanocomposite with components with temperature-dependent material properties. Reddy’s third-order shear deformation theory and a moving least square shape function-based mesh-free method were utilized for thermoelastic dynamic analysis. The effects of CNT cluster size, distribution, and volume fraction as well as thermal load on the thermoelastic dynamic behavior of nanocomposite sandwich plates were investigated. It was observed that the distribution and cluster size of CNTs had significant effects on the amplitude and speed of thermoelastic stress wave propagation in the nanocomposite sandwich plates.