Thermal post-buckling of slender composite and FGM columns through a simple and novel FE formulation

Abstract

A simple and novel finite element (FE) formulation is proposed to study the thermal post-buckling of composite and FGM columns with axially immovable ends and operating in severe thermal environment. A linear eigenvalue analysis gives the critical buckling temperature but practically the buckled columns can withstand additional thermal load beyond critical temperature, which can be obtained using von-Karman geometric nonlinearity, applicable for moderately large deflections. In the present study, the solution of the non-linear post-buckling problem is obtained by treating it as a linear eigenvalue problem using the concept of effective stiffness. Here, the total degrees of freedom (dof) of the discretized column are reduced and the post-buckling load is obtained without the need for iterative analysis. Comparison of the numerical results obtained from this FE formulation is in very good agreement with those obtained from the earlier FE formulations.