Imperfection sensitivity of thermal post-buckling behaviour of functionally graded carbon nanotube-reinforced composite beams

This paper investigates the imperfection sensitivity of thermal post-buckling behaviour of functionally graded carbon nanotube-reinforced composite (FG-CNTRC) beams subjected to in-plane temperature variation. The material properties of FG-CNTRCs are assumed to be graded in the thickness direction and temperature-dependent. A generic imperfection function is used to model various possible imperfections, including sine type, global and localized imperfections. The governing equations are derived based on the first-order shear deformation beam theory and von-Karman geometric nonlinearity. The differential quadrature method in conjunction with modified Newton-Raphson technique is employed to determine the thermal post-buckling equilibrium path of imperfect FG-CNTRC beams. Thermal buckling is treated as a subset problem. A parametric study is conducted to examine the effects of imperfection mode, half-wave number, location and amplitude on their thermal post-buckling performance. The influences of distribution pattern and volume fraction of carbon nanotubes, boundary conditions and slenderness ratio are discussed as well. The results indicate that the thermal post-buckling is highly sensitive to the imperfection mode, half-wave number, location as well as its amplitude. It is also shown that the clamped-clamped FG-CNTRC beam is more sensitive to imperfections than those with other boundary conditions whereas other parameters do not substantially affect the imperfection sensitivity of thermal post-buckling behaviour. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.