Thermal buckling analysis of FGM sandwich truncated conical shells reinforced by FGM stiffeners resting on elastic foundations using FSDT

This work presents an analytical approach to investigate the mechanical and thermal buckling of functionally graded materials sandwich truncated conical shells resting on Pasternak elastic foundations, subjected to thermal load and axial compressive load. Shells are reinforced by closely spaced stringers and rings, in which the material properties of shells and stiffeners are graded in the thickness direction following a general sigmoid law distribution and a general power law distribution. Four models of coated shell-stiffener arrangements are investigated. The change of spacing between stringers in the meridional direction also is taken into account. Two cases on uniform temperature rise and linear temperature distribution through the thickness of shell are considered. Using the first-order shear deformation theory, Lekhnitskii smeared stiffener technique and the adjacent equilibrium criterion, the linearization stability equations have been established. Approximate solution satisfies simply supported boundary conditions and Galerkin method is applied to obtain closed-form expression for determining the critical compression buckling load and thermal buckling load in cases uniform temperature rise and linear temperature distribution across the shell thickness. The effects of temperature, foundation, core layer, coating layer, stiffeners, material properties, dimensional parameters and semi-vertex angle on buckling behaviors of shell are shown.