Snap-through phenomenon in a thermally postbuckled temperature dependent sandwich beam with FG-CNTRC face sheets

Snap-through phenomenon due to a uniform lateral pressure in a thermally post-buckled sandwich beam is analyzed in this research. It is assumed that material properties of the core and face sheets are temperature dependent. Face sheets are reinforced with carbon nanotube whose distribution may be uniform or functionally graded. Thermomechanical properties of the face sheets are obtained using a refined rule of mixtures approach. To capture the large deflections, geometrical nonlinearity in von-Karman sense is taken into account. Chebyshev polynomial based Ritz method is implemented into the virtual displacement principle to construct the matrix representation of the equilibrium equations. A successive displacement control strategy is used to trace the temperature dependent post-buckling equilibrium path. Due to the possibility of snap-through phenomenon, cylindrical arch-length technique is used to trace the equilibrium path of a pressurized thermally post-buckled sandwich beam beyond the limit loads. It is shown that, upper limit load of the beam increases as the temperature gradient increases. Furthermore, volume fraction of CNTs affects the snap-through load and snap-through intensity of the beam, meanwhile, the influence of graded profile of CNTs on snap-through features is almost negligible. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.