Flexural Strength of Functionally Graded Nanotube Reinforced Sandwich Spherical Panel

The flexural behaviour of the functionally graded sandwich spherical panel under uniform thermal environment has been investigated in the present work. The face sheets of the sandwich structure are made by the functionally graded carbon nanotube reinforced material and the core face is made by the isotropic and homogeneous material. The material properties of both the fiber and matrix are assumed to be temperature dependent. The sandwich panel model is developed in the framework of the first order shear deformation theory and the governing equation of motion is derived using the variational principle. For the discretization purpose a suitable shell element has been employed from the ANSYS library and the responses are computed using a parametric design language (APDL) coding. The performance and accuracy of the developed model has been established through the convergence and validation by comparing the obtained results with previously published results. Finally, the influence of different geometrical parameters and material properties on the flexural behaviour of the sandwich spherical panel in thermal environment has been investigated through various numerical illustrations and discussed in details.