Bending of FGM plates under thermal load: Classical thermoelasticity analysis by a meshless method

Thermal stresses, especially at the interface between two different materials, often play an important role in the failure of laminated composite structures. Thus, it is a strong motivation to replace laminated plate structures by FGM ones if possible. The functional gradation of material coefficients, however, yields new coupling effects between the in-plane deformation and bending modes. Therefore the study of behaviour of FGM plates under thermal loadings has become important. In this paper, the bending of thin and/or thick FGM plates under thermal load is considered within the classical theory of thermoelasticity. The variable material properties of plate (such as the Young's modulus, thermal expansion coefficient, etc.) are allowed to be continuous functions of the position. The governing equations which are given by the 4th order partial differential equations (PDE) are decomposed into the 2nd order PDEs in order to overcome the inaccuracy of approximation of high order derivatives of field variables. The strong form meshless formulations for solution of thin plate bending problem is developed in combination with Moving Least Squares (MLS) approximation scheme. The attention is paid to the study of the influence of various parameters of gradations of material coefficients on bending of plates.