Thermal postbuckling behavior of imperfect shear deformable laminated plates with temperature-dependent properties

Thermal postbuckling analysis is presented for a simply supported, shear deformable laminated plate subjected to a uniform temperature rise and resting on an elastic foundation. The material properties of the composite are assumed to be functions of temperature. The formulations are based on Reddy's higher order shear deformation prate theory, and including the plate-foundation interaction and thermal effects. The initial geometric imperfection of the plate is taken into account. A perturbation technique and an iterative numerical procedure are employed to determine the buckling temperature and thermal postbuckling load-deflection curves. A program is developed for the purpose and many examples are solved numerically. The numerical illustrations concern the thermal postbuckling behavior of antisymmetric angle-ply and symmetric cross-ply laminated plates under different sets of thermoelastic properties and without an elastic foundation or resting on two-parameter elastic foundations from which results for Winkler elastic foundations are obtained as a limiting case. The effects played by transverse shear deformation, plate aspect ratio, total number of plies, fiber orientation, foundation stiffness as well as initial geometric imperfections are studied. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.