Vibrational characteristics of sandwich annular plates with damaged core and FG face sheets

The main goal of this paper is to study the vibration of damaged core laminated annular plates with FG face sheets based on a three-dimensional theory of elasticity. The structures are made of a damaged isotropic core and two external face sheets. These skins are strengthened at the nanoscale level by randomly oriented Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and are reinforced at the microscale stage by oriented straight fibers. These reinforcing phases are included in a polymer matrix and a three-phase approach based on the Eshelby-Mori-Tanaka scheme and on the Halpin-Tsai approach, which is developed to compute the overall mechanical properties of the composite material. In this study the effect of microcracks on the vibrational characteristic of the sandwich plate is considered. In particular, the structures are made by an isotropic core that undergoes a progressive uniform damage, which is modeled as a decay of the mechanical properties expressed in terms of engineering constants. These defects are uniformly distributed and affect the central layer of the plates independently from the direction, this phenomenon is known as "isotropic damage" and it is fully described by a scalar parameter. Three complicated equations of motion for the sectorial plates under consideration are semi-analytically solved by using 2-D differential quadrature method. Using the 2-D differential quadrature method in the r- and z-directions, allows one to deal with sandwich annular plate with arbitrary thickness distribution of material properties and also to implement the effects of different boundary conditions of the structure efficiently and in an exact manner. The fast rate of convergence and accuracy of the method are investigated through the different solved examples. The sandwich annular plate is assumed to have any arbitrary boundary conditions at the circular edges including simply supported, clamped and, free. Several parametric analyses are carried out to investigate the mechanical behavior of these multi-layered structures depending on the damage features, through-the-thickness distribution, and boundary conditions.