On the thermal expansion effects in the transverse direction of laminated composite plates by means of a global–local higher-order model

In this paper, a new efficient global–local higher-order model is proposed for the thermoelastic analysis of laminated composite and sandwich plates. The proposed model takes into account explicitly the contribution of thermal expansion in the transverse displacement component. To satisfy the transverse displacement continuity along the thickness direction, the continuity condition of transverse displacement at interfaces, which is not satisfied in many other schemes, has been a priori enforced. This model fully satisfies the free surface conditions and the geometric and stress continuity conditions at interfaces. As the number of variables of the proposed model is independent of the number of layers of laminates, compared to the 1,2–3 theory proposed by Li and Liu (1997) [20], the present model offers some significant improvements, and is able to predict accurately thermoelastic response of laminated plates under uniform temperature without a corresponding increase in the number of unknowns. The governing equations of equilibrium are derived by means of the principle of virtual displacements involving the thermal strain field. Applying Navier's technique, analytical solutions in terms of a double trigonometric series for simply supported laminated plates are presented. Results of benchmark examples are compared with the three-dimensional thermoelastic solutions as well as other published works. Numerical results show that the proposed model is more rigorous and can better predict the thermoelastic response in comparison with the 1,2–3 theory and other two-dimensional models.