Exact solutions for the stability and free vibration of sandwich piezoelectric plates with an embedded carbon nanotube-reinforced composite core and under bi-axial compressive loads

Abstract

Exact three-dimensional (3D) stability and free vibration analyses of bi-axially loaded and simply-supported sandwich piezoelectric plates with an embedded either functionally graded (FG) carbon nanotube-reinforced composite (CNTRC) core or multilayered fiber-reinforced composite (FRC) one are presented Three different distributions of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) through the thickness of the CNTRC core i e uniformly distributed and FG V- rhombus- and X-type variations are considered and the effective material properties of the CNTRC core are estimated by the rule of mixtures The Pagano method which is conventionally used for the analysis of multilayered FRC plates is modified to be feasible for the study of sandwich hybrid CNTRC and piezoelectric ones in which Reissner’s mixed variational theorem the successive approximation and transfer matrix methods and the transformed real-valued solutions of the system equations are used The modified Pagano solutions for the stability and free vibration of multilayered hybrid FRC and piezoelectric plates are in excellent agreement with the exact 3D ones available in the literature and those for sandwich hybrid CNTRC and piezoelectric plates may be used as the benchmark solutions to assess the ones obtained using various two-dimensional theories and numerical models

Date of Award	2014 Jun 17
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chih-Ping Wu (Supervisor)