Thermal buckling of functionally graded plates

Abstract

Plates and shells are widely used in several areas, such as civil construction, automotive, aerospace, naval, and defense industries. The application of Functionally Graded Materials (FGM) in plate and shell structures can provide several benefits. FGMs are composed by two or more materials, in which the microstructure changes continuously and smoothly from one surface to another, being designed to achieve the desired properties according to the application of interest. The most common are those composed of ceramic and metallic materials, used for example in structures subjected to high temperatures used in the aerospace industry. The structures of plates and shells can be highly slender, becoming sensitive to collapse due to buckling. Thus, this study focuses on the analysis of FGM plates stability at high temperatures, evaluating the influence of the slenderness and the volume fraction distribution in the critical temperature and post-critical behavior. The numerical simulations of the FGM structures are performed using the commercial software Abaqus. To correctly represent the thermomechanical behavior of functionally graded materials, the Virtual Lamina Method (VLM) for buckling and user material subroutines (UMATs) for post-buckling are applied.