Heat conduction analysis of laminated shells by a sampling surfaces method

•Application of the sampling surfaces method to the heat conduction theory.•Heat conduction analysis of 3D laminated composite shells.•Exact 3D solutions for cross-ply and angle-ply cylindrical shells and panels.

A paper focuses on the use of the method of sampling surfaces (SaS) for the exact three-dimensional (3D) heat conduction analysis of laminated orthotropic and anisotropic shells. This method is based on selecting inside the nth layer In not equally spaced SaS parallel to the middle surface of the shell in order to choose the temperatures of these surfaces as basic variables. Such an idea permits the representation of the proposed thermal laminated shell formulation in a very compact form. The SaS are located inside each layer at Chebyshev polynomial nodes that improves the convergence of the SaS method significantly. As a result, the SaS method can be applied efficiently to exact 3D solutions of the steady-state heat conduction problem for cross-ply and angle-ply composite shells with a specified accuracy using a sufficient number of SaS.