Critical thermal buckling analysis of porous FGP sandwich plates under various boundary conditions

Critical thermal buckling of functionally graded porous (FGP) sandwich plates under various types of thermal loading is considered. It is assumed that the mechanical and thermal nonhomogeneous properties of FGP sandwich plate vary smoothly by distribution of power law across the thickness of sandwich plate. In this paper, porosity defects are modeled as stiffness reduction criteria and included in the rule of mixture. The thermal environments are considered as uniform, linear and nonlinear temperature rises. The critical buckling temperature response of FGM sandwich plates has been analyzed under various boundary conditions. By comparing several numerical examples with the reference solutions, the results indicate that the present analysis has good accuracy and rapid convergence. Further, the effects of various parameters like distribution shape of porosity, sandwich combinations, aspect ratio, thickness ratio, boundary conditions on critical buckling temperature of FGP sandwich plate have been studied in this paper.