Thermal and mechanical instability of functionally graded truncated conical shells

Thermal and mechanical instability of truncated conical shells made of functionally graded material (FGM) is studied in this paper. It is assumed that the shell is a mixture of metal and ceramic that its properties changes as a function of the shell thickness. The governing equations are based on the first-order shell theory and the Sanders nonlinear kinematics equations. The results are obtained for a number of thermal and mechanical loads and are validated with the known data in the literature. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.