Degradation of thermal postbuckling behaviors of functionally graded material in aero-hygrothermal environments

This paper presents aero-elastic analysis for the characteristics of functionally graded material (FGM) panel exposed to hygrothermal environments. The analysis is performed to study the behaviors due to the variation of temperature and moisture on the structure. To consider the supersonic aerodynamic flow, the first-order piston theory is adopted. Equations of motions are derived by the principle of virtual work, and Newton-Raphson iterative method is applied to solve the nonlinear equations. To verify the present work, numerical results are compared with previous data in the literatures. Finally, the influences of temperature, moisture concentration, aspect ratio and volume fraction index of the model are investigated in detail. Especially, the results show that absorbed moisture and high temperature degrade the structural performance.