Accurate thermo-electro-mechanical buckling of shear deformable piezoelectric fiber-reinforced composite cylindrical shells

An accurate buckling analysis for piezoelectric fiber-reinforced composite (PFRC) cylindrical shells subjected to combined loads comprising compression, external voltage and thermal load is presented in this paper. Based on Reddy’s higher-order shear deformation theory, the governing equations for the coupled displacement field and induced piezoelectric field are established. Considering two different kinds of fiber-reinforced configurations, i.e. uniformly distributed (UD) and functionally graded (FG) reinforcements, the buckling solutions of perfect and imperfect PFRC cylindrical shells are obtained by applying separation of variables and Galerkin’s method. The influence of geometric parameters, piezoelectric effect, external electric voltage, temperature field and fibers distribution configurations on buckling characteristics and imperfection sensitivity are discussed in detail. The formulation system thus developed is suitable to other shell theories and to account for the coupled electro-magneto-thermo-elastic effects.