Large thermo-elastic displacement and stability FEM analysis of multilayered plates and shells

•We compute limit loads for elastic multilayered shells under temperature rise.•Thermo-elastic stability of a structure is examined within incremental analysis.•The material's strength is controlled according to Tsai–Wu hypothesis.•Due to the nature of the problem an appropriate tracing path algorithm is required.•We use our own program to reexamine a set of examples known from literature.

The paper concerns the load capacity analysis of thermally loaded multilayered plates and shells. The multilayered body is treated as an equivalent single layer whose kinematics is consistent with the first-order shear deformation theory. The authors focus on the thermo-elastic stability problem of the thin-walled structures. The equilibrium paths are traced with the use of Riks–Wempner–Ramm algorithm. By making use of the Tsai–Wu hypothesis the material's strength examination is included in the study. The considered problems are resolved with the authors' program. The presented results confirm that proposed model can be very effective in the stability analysis of multilayered panels.