Thermal Postbuckling Behavior of Laminated Composite Spherical Shell Panel Using NFEM^#

Abstract

Postbuckling behavior of laminated shell panel in thermal environment is reported in this article. The geometric nonlinearity is introduced in Green–Lagrange sense and the model is developed for the geometrically large translations and/or rotations and the excess thermal deformation of the curved panel based on higher order shear deformation theory (HSDT) using nonlinear finite element. The governing equation of shell panel is derived by minimizing the energy expression. The postbuckling strength in terms of temperature ratio (postbuckling to buckling temperature) of the panel by obtained by a direct iterative method. The results are obtained using the developed model and compared with those of the available published literature. Some of the new results are computed for different parameters such as layup sequences, thickness ratios, amplitude ratios, boundary conditions, aspect ratios, and various curvature ratios and presented.

Keywords:

• Green–Lagrange nonlinearity
• HSDT
• Nonlinear FEM
• Spherical shell panel
• Thermal postbuckling

Notes

^#Communicated by G. Halbert.