The role of micromechanical models in the mechanical response of elastic foundation FG sandwich thick beams

This paper presents an analysis of the bending, buckling and free vibration of functionally graded sandwich beams resting on elastic foundation by using a refined quasi-3D theory in which both shear deformation and thickness stretching effects are included. The displacement field contains only three unknowns, which is less than the number of parameters of many other shear deformation theories. In order to homogenize the micromechanical properties of the FGM sandwich beam, the material properties are derived on the basis of several micromechanical models such as Tamura, Voigt, Reuss and many others. The principle of virtual works is used to obtain the equilibrium equations. The elastic foundation is modeled using the Pasternak mathematical model. The governing equations are obtained through the Hamilton\'s principle and then are solved via Navier solution for the simply supported beam. The accuracy of the proposed theory can be noticed by comparing it with other 3D solution available in the literature. A detailed parametric study is presented to show the influence of the micromechanical models on the general behavior of FG sandwich beams on elastic foundation.