A modified Kirchhoff plate theory for analyzing thermo-mechanical static and buckling responses of functionally graded material plates

In this paper, we present a modified Kirchhoff theory for analyzing thermo-mechanical static and buckling responses of functionally graded material (FGM) isotropic and sandwich plates. In comparison to the classical Kirchhoff theory, the proposed method is taken account into the shear deformation effects, then it can be applied for both moderately thick and thin plates. On the other hand, comparing to the first order shear deformation theory (FSDT) or Reissner-Mindlin plate theory, the number of independent unknowns reduces one variable and retains four degrees of freedom (Dofs) per node. The shear locking phenomenon is also negligible due to extending from the classical Kirchhoff theory. Furthermore, a new normalization of a quartic form is used to build the shape functions in the radial point interpolation method (RPIM). The novel imposing essential boundary conditions related to slopes of deflections has been proposed, then the enforcement of these gradient deflections becomes easily and directly as the same in finite element analysis. The obtained numerical results for the thermo-mechanical static and buckling problems from the proposed method are stable and well accurate prediction as comparing to the exact solutions and other published analyses.