Bending analysis of moderately thick functionally graded conical panels

Considering the application of functionally graded (FG) materials in various industries, the present study aims to investigate bending of moderately thick clamped FG conical panels subjected to uniform and non-uniform distributed loadings. Effective mechanical properties which are vary from one surface of the panel to the other assumed to be defined by a power law distribution. Three different ceramic-metal sets of materials are studied. First-order shear deformation theory (FSDT) is applied to drive the governing equations of the problem which consists of five highly coupled second order partial differential equations (PDEs). The governing equations are then solved by the Extended Kantorovich Method (EKM). It is also shown that the presented formulation and solution technique can be used to obtain accurate predictions for other types of structures such as circular cylinders and rectangular plates. Predictions for cylindrical panels and plates show very good agreement with published data in the literature. Due to lack of data for FG conical panels in the literature, finite element code ANSYS is used to validate results of the presented method for FG conical panels which show very good agreement. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.