Efficient free vibration analysis of FGM sandwich flat panels with conventional shell elements

Abstract

An efficient finite element model based on conventional shell elements available in ABAQUS software has been developed for free vibration analysis of FGM monolayer and sandwich flat panels. Applications to sandwich plates with an FGM layer embedded as either a core or face sheets with different through-the-thickness material gradations in the form of power (P-FGM), sigmoid (S-FGM), and exponential (E-FGM) distributions are considered. A user-defined material subroutine UMAT was used to implement functionally graded properties of the constitutive FGM layer. Numerical studies are given for free vibrations of monolayer and sandwich plates subjected to various boundary conditions and with different structural parameters such as span-to-thickness, face sheet-core-face sheet thickness and aspect ratios, and volume fraction index. The studies showed very good agreement between the present results and those existing in the literature that confirmed the accuracy of the developed model at minimal computational costs. This emphasizes the efficiency of the shell-based modeling strategy proposed for the calculations. A series of numerical solutions obtained in the research extends the results of known testing examples and may serve as additional benchmark data for other analysts.

Keywords:

• sandwich panels
• functionally graded materials
• shell finite elements
• free vibration analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.