Analysis of the thermal instability of laminated composite plates

In this paper, we will analyse the thermo-elastic behavior of the plate element of a structure arranged in a climatically aggressive environment (extreme temperature), we use a refined four-variable thick plate theory to take the shear effect into consideration, the proposed theory less computationally expensive and more accurate so that it incorporates the shear effect into the formulation. The plate is assumed to be simply supported on its four edges, so exact (closed-form) solutions are found according to the Navier expansion, and the governing stability equations and associated boundary conditions of the problem are obtained via the virtual works principle. The plate studied is made of laminated composite materials, so a parametric study is needed to see the effect of different types of parameters and coupling on the critical temperature value causing thermo-elastic instability of the plate and also on the natural frequency of free vibration, as well as for other parameters such as anisotropy, slenderness and aspect ratio of the plate and finally the lamination angle. Numerical results are obtained for specially orthotropic and antisymmetrical plates and are compared with those obtained by other theories in the literature to validate the analysis approach used.