Numerical study on the thermal buckling of functionally graded sandwich plates

Functionally graded (FG) sandwich plates have been spotlighted as an advanced composite structure so that the vast amount of research efforts have paid on the study of their thermo-mechanical behaviors. Among them, the thermal buckling has emerged as an important research subject because it is directly related to the safety of structural system. In this situation, this paper examines the thermal buckling behavior of ceramic-metal FG sandwich plates with a homogeneous core and two FGM face sheets. The thermal buckling problem is formulated according to 3-D thermo-elasticity and approximated by making use of a (1,1,0) hierarchical model and 2-D natural element method (NEM). The NEM-based numerical method was compared with the reference methods, from which its reliability was verified. In addition, the critical buckling temperatures (CBTs) of ceramic-metal FG sandwich plates subject to uniform, linear and nonlinear temperature loads are parametrically examined. The parametric experiments informed that the CBT is strongly influenced by the width/thickness, core thickness and aspect ratios, the ceramic and nonlinearity indices, and the boundary condition type.