Thermal buckling of temperature-dependent FG-CNT-reinforced composite skew plates

Abstract

ABSTRACTCritical buckling temperatures of skew plates made from a polymeric matrix reinforced by single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are obtained in the present research. Reinforcements are distributed across the thickness of the plate uniformly or according to a prescribed nonuniform function. All of the thermomechanical properties are assumed to be temperature dependent. First-order shear deformation plate theory is used as the basic assumption to obtain the total strain and potential energies of the plate due to the thermally induced prebuckling loads. A transformation is proposed to express the components of the displacement field in an oblique coordinate system. A Ritz-based solution is implemented to obtain the matrix representation of the stability equations associated to the onset of buckling. Gram–Schmidt process is used to obtain a set of orthogonal shape functions as the basis polynomials of the Ritz method. The obtained eigenvalue problem is solved successively to extract the critical buckling temperature of the skew plate. Convergence and comparison studies are provided to assure the accuracy and correctness of the proposed formulation. Afterward, parametric studies are given to explore the influences of boundary conditions, CNT volume fraction, CNT dispersion profile, aspect ratio, skew angle, and side to thickness ratio.