Thermoelastic deflection responses of CNT reinforced sandwich shell structure using finite-element method

The bending responses of nanotube-reinforced curved sandwich shell panel structure are studied under the influence of the thermomechanical loading. Further, the temperature-dependent material properties of the sandwich structure are assumed to evaluate the exact responses. In addition, the face sheets of the sandwich construction are modelled using different grading patterns through the panel thickness. The final form of the equilibrium equation of the deflected sandwich structure is obtained by minimising the total potential energy functional. Now, the equation is solved computationally via a suitable computer code (MATLAB) using the novel higher-order kinematics including the finite-element method. The constancy and accuracy of the current finite-element solutions are verified by solving a different kind of numerical examples the same as those of the published examples. The effects of parameters associated with structural stiffness and the flexural behaviour of the nanotube-reinforced curved sandwich structural panel are examined together with different temperature distributions (uniform and linear). The final conclusions are discussed in detail. (C) 2018 Sharif University of Technology. All rights reserved.