Enhancement of thermal buckling strength of laminated sandwich composite panel structure embedded with shape memory alloy fibre

The present article reported the thermal buckling strength of the sandwich shell panel structure and subsequent improvement of the same by embedding shape memory alloy (SMA) fibre via a general higher-order mathematical model in conjunction with finite element method. The geometrical distortion of the panel structure due to the temperature is included using Green-Lagrange strain-displacement relations. In addition, the material nonlinearity of SMA fibre due to the elevated thermal environment also incorporated in the current analysis through the marching technique. The final form of the equilibrium equation is obtained by minimising the total potential energy functional and solved computationally with the help of an original MATLAB code. The convergence and the accuracy of the developed model are demonstrated by solving similar kind of published numerical examples including the necessary input parameter. After the necessary establishment of the newly developed numerical solution, the model is extended further to examine the effect of the different structural parameters (side-to-thickness ratios, curvature ratios, core-to-face thickness ratios, volume fractions of SMA fibre and end conditions) on the buckling strength of the SMA embedded sandwich composite shell panel including the different geometrical configurations.