Thermo-electro-mechanical behavior of an advanced smart lightweight sandwich plate

In this paper, a meshless method has been developed to analyze stresses and deflections in an advanced smart lightweight sandwich plate (ASLSP) subjected to thermo-electro-mechanical loads. In ASLSP, a passive sandwich plate consisting of a lightweight porous core and two graphene nanocomposite layers is integrated between two active piezoceramic faces. Moreover, functionally graded profiles have been considered for the dispersions of porosity and graphene in their corresponding layers. In the meshless method, MLS shape functions has been utilized, and essential boundary conditions are implemented using transformation approach. A version of Halpin-Tsai equations capable of capturing nanoscale effects of randomly oriented graphene is adopted to approximate the temperature dependent mechanical properties of graphene nanocomposite layers. The highly coupled governing equations are extracted by minimizing total energy function obtained from the estimation of displacement domain with Reddy's third order plate theory (called TSDT). The influences of different aspects of ASLSP including loading, graphene content, porosity and geometric details have been studied on thermo-electro-mechanical stresses and deflections. It is observed that both graphene content and dispersion profile have considerable influence on ASLSP's deflections. Moreover, embedding pores in core layer offers a significant reduction in structural weight and a considerable stability in structural bending stiffness. (C) 2020 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.