General non-uniform quadrilateral cross-sections for thin-walled FG sandwich beams

Abstract

The paper aims at introducing an analysis of thin-walled functionally graded sandwich beams for general non-uniform quadrilateral cross-sections. Generally, the materials are assumed to be graded through the thickness following a predefined shape while Poisson's ratio kept as a constant due to its less domination. The cross-section linearly varies from one end to another end of the beam. In order to relax the difficulties in modeling as well as capturing the behaviors of thin-walled functionally graded beams, a higher-order approach has been applied including warping, coupling distortions as well as Poisson's distortion. A multi-separated beam on each edge of the cross-section which is an application of the so-called beam-frame-modal method is adopted. Subsequently, the effects of these major importance along with anisotropy of materials are then fully considered. As a consequence, the analysis is able to extensively applied to closed-section beam-shells with different curvatures. In order to illustrate the accuracy and computational efficiency of the method, various examples have been conducted in which the results obtained from finite element package as ABAQUS are employed.
 Keywords:
 quadrilateral cross-section; thin-walled FG beam; higher-order coupling; beam frame modal.