BUCKLING OF CIRCULAR SANDWICH PLATES OF VARIABLE CORE THICKNESS AND FGM FACE SHEETS

Abstract

Presented herein is the buckling response of circular sandwich plates with a homogenous core of variable thickness and constant thickness functionally graded material (FGM) face sheets whose material properties are assumed to be graded in the thickness direction according to a simple power law. The plate is modeled using the first order shear deformation plate theory and subjected to a uniform radial compression. In order to determine the distribution of the prebuckling load along the radius, the membrane equation is solved using the shooting method. Subsequently, by employing the pseudospectral method that makes use of Chebyshev polynomials, the stability equations are solved numerically to evaluate the critical buckling load. Numerical solutions are presented for both clamped and simply supported plates and for linear and parabolic core thickness distributions. The results show that the buckling behavior is significantly influenced by the thickness variation profile, the aspect ratio, the volume fraction index, and the core-to-face sheet thickness ratio. Comparison studies demonstrate that the results obtained using the current method compare very well with those available in the literature.