Variational asymptotic modeling of the thermomechanical behavior of composite cylindrical shells

An efficient shell model is developed for analyzing one-way coupled thermomechanical behavior of composite cylindrical shells by using the variational asymptotic method (VAM). Taking advantage of the smallness parameter inherent in the shell structure, the VAM is applied to rigorously decouple the 3-D, thermoelasticity problem into a 1-D through-the-thickness analysis and a 2-D shell analysis. The through-the-thickness analysis servers as a link between the original 3-D analysis and the shell analysis by providing a constitutive model for the shell analysis and recovering the 3-D field variables in terms of global responses calculated by the shell analysis. The present model is valid for large displacements and global rotations and can capture all the geometric nonlinearity of a shell when the strains are small. A few examples are used to validate this model.

► VAM is used to systematically reduce the 3-D, thermoelasticity problem to a series of 2-D models.
► The model can handle both geometrically linear and nonlinear shell analysis.
► The model can consider all possible deformation without any ad hoc kinematic assumptions.
► The arbitrary temperature distribution is approximated by a layerwise fourth-degree polynomial.