Thermoelastic analysis of functionally graded porous materials with temperature-dependent properties by a staggered finite volume method

The cell-vertex finite volume method (CV-FVM) is developed for the thermoelastic analysis of the functionally graded porous (FGP) structures with temperature-dependent material properties. The staggered grid technique is employed to incorporate property variation into the discretization of governing equations. And the iterative approach is used to solve the nonlinear heat conduction equation to obtain convergent and matched temperature solution. The force equilibrium equation is solved without iteration to obtain displacements. The accuracy of the present method for functionally graded materials with temperature-dependency has been validated. Then the thermoelastic performance of FGP plates with different material distribution is investigated. It is found that the thermal stress is much more sensitive to the material distribution than the temperature and the deformation. The combination of the material distribution and the temperature-dependency causes different locations of maximum magnitudes of the thermal stress and the normalized equivalent stress. In the present case, the existence of the porosity helps to reduce the thermal stress to some extent.