This paper deals with the thermo-mechanical deformation behaviour of shear deformable functionally graded sandwich plates resting on a two-parameter (Pasternak model) elastic foundation. By dividing the transverse displacement into bending and shear parts, the number of unknowns and governing equations of the present theory is reduced, and hence, makes it simple to use. The presented theory is variationally consistent, does not require shear correction factor and gives rise to transverse shear stress variation such that the transverse shear stresses vary in hyperbolic manner across the thickness satisfying shear stress-free surface conditions. A power-law distribution for the mechanical characteristics is adopted to model the continuous variation of properties from those of one component to those of the other. The sandwich plate faces are made of isotropic, two-constituent (ceramic-metal) material distribution through the thickness. The core layer is still homogeneous and made of an isotropic metal material. Several kinds of nonsymmetric sandwich plates are presented. The governing equations and boundary
Nonlinear behavior of functionally graded material (FGM) plates under thermal loads is investigated here using an efficient sinusoidal shear deformation theory. The displacement field is chosen based on assumptions that the in-plane and transverse displacements consist of bending and shear components, and the shear components of in-plane displacements give rise to the sinusoidal distribution of transverse shear stress through the thickness in such a way that shear stresses vanish on the plate surfaces. Therefore, there is no need to use shear correction factor. Unlike the conventional sinusoidal shear deformation theory, the proposed efficient sinusoidal shear deformation theory contains only four unknowns. The material is graded in the thickness direction and a simple power law based on the rule of mixture is used to estimate the effective material properties. The neutral surface position for such FGM plates is determined and the sinusoidal shear deformation theory based on exact neutral surface position is employed here. There is no stretching-bending coupling effect in the neutral surface-based formulation, and consequently, the governing equations and boundary conditions of functionally graded plates based on neutral surface have the simple forms as those of isotropic plates. The non-linear strain-displacement relations are also taken into consideration. The thermal loads are assumed as uniform, linear and non-linear temperature rises across the thickness direction. Closed-form solutions are presented to calculate the critical buckling temperature, which are useful for engineers in design. Numerical results are presented for the present efficient sinusoidal shear deformation theory, demonstrating its importance and accuracy in comparison to other theories.
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