Temperature dependent thermomechanical bending response of functionally graded sandwich plates

Abstract

A higher-order shear deformation plate theory (HSDT) is applied in this work to study the thermomechanical bending behavior of sandwich plates composed of functionally graded (FG) face sheets and fully ceramic core. Material properties of the FG sandwich plate are dependent on temperature and supposed to be graded continuously across the sandwich plate thickness direction. Power-law model is adopted to describe continuous variation of material properties of FG sandwich plate. Temperature variation along the thickness direction is obtained by solving the one-dimensional heat conduction equation. An accurate solution of temperature variation along the thickness direction is employed by taking into account the thermal conductivity, the inhomogeneity parameter and the sandwich schemes. The governing equations of simply-supported FG sandwich plates are derived by means of the Hamilton’s variational principle combined with the Navier’s solutions. Numerical results indicate the impact of volume fraction index, temperature difference and side-to-thickness ratio on the deflections and stresses are carried out. The accuracy of the proposed five-order shear deformation theory is validated by comparing it with some available solutions in the literature. The present model is simple and can theoretically cover the existing polynomial models.