Transient thermal stresses in functionally graded thick truncated cones by graded finite element method

• The use of classical theory of thermoelasticity together with graded finite elements.
• The effect of cone angle on thermal stresses of FGM truncated cone has been studied.
• Differences between thermal stresses of FGM cone and cylinder have been studied.

In this paper, an axisymmetric thick truncated cone made of functionally graded materials under transient thermal loads based on classical theory of linear thermoelasticity is considered. The cone is made of a combined ceramic–metal material, and its material is graded through the thickness direction according to a power law distribution. Graded finite element method based on Rayleigh–Ritz energy formulation and Crank–Nicolson algorithm is used to solve the problem in time and space domain. Distributions of temperature, displacements and stresses for different power law exponent and semi-vertex angle of the cone are investigated. Results denote that the distributions of radial displacement are qualitatively similar for the cones and cylinders but the stresses are not and due to increasing the semi-vertex angle, the nature of radial, axial and tangential stresses near the small or large bases of the cone changes. The proposed method is verified by an example which is extracted from published literature and it shows very good agreement.