Bending and vibration of functionally graded material sandwich plates using an accurate theory

In this paper, the bending and the free flexural vibration behaviour of sandwich functionally graded material (FGM) plates are investigated using QUAD-8 shear flexible element developed based on higher order structural theory. This theory accounts for the realistic variation of the displacements through the thickness. The governing equations obtained here are solved for static analysis considering two types of sandwich FGM plates, viz., homogeneous face sheets with FGM core and FGM face sheets with homogeneous hard core. The in-plane and rotary inertia terms are considered for vibration studies. The accuracy of the present formulation is tested considering the problems for which three-dimensional elasticity solutions are available. A detailed numerical study is carried out based on various higher-order models to examine the influence of the gradient index and the plate aspect ratio on the global/local response of different sandwich FGM plates. & 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.