Thermo mechanical analysis of functionally graded material plates

Abstract

Functionally Graded Materials (FGM) are special type of composite materials whose relative volume fractions are engineered to have a continuous spatial variation. Studies are being made on the thermo-mechanical behaviour of circular and rectangular FGM plates using various methods like Mori-tanaka scheme, Reddy theory and first order plate theory. Studies on the thermo mechanical behaviour of tapered FGM plates could not be traced. In this context, thermo-mechanical analyses of tapered FGM plates have been taken in the present research work. The effect of adding metal or ceramic strip of specified thickness to the corresponding face has also been studied. In the present research, an Element Free Galerkein (EFG) method has been developed. In the analysis of FGM circular plate, axi-symmetric bending is investigated under uniformly distributed transverse mechanical, thermal and combined mechanical thermal loadings. Effects of law of variation of volume fraction of constituents with respect to the thickness of the plate and boundary conditions on the temperature distribution, nonlinear bending, critical buckling temperature and thermal post-buckling behaviour are studied. The thermo-mechanical analyses of the rectangular FGM plates show that lowering the index, n, tends to lower the central deflection. The results derived from EFG method are compared with those obtained from the linear rectangular finite element method. Thermo-mechanical analysis of tapered FGM plates using single function analysis and two function analysis have been carried out using Element Free Galerkein method. It is found that about 50% savings in computational time compared to the finite element method. The increase in taper tends to decrease the deflection of the plate. The addition of metal or ceramic plate to one face of a tapered FGM plate decreases the deflection. When FGM plates do not have enough strength in a particular application, metal or ceramic plate can be bonded to the FGM tapered plate to improve it. newline