Three-dimensional analysis of thermal stresses in four-parameter continuous grading fiber reinforced cylindrical panels

In this paper, three-dimensional analysis of thermal stresses in four-parameter continuous grading fiber reinforced cylindrical panel subjected to thermal load is studied. The cylindrical panel is assumed to be made of an orthotropic material. The continuous grading fiber reinforced panel has a smooth variation in matrix volume fraction in the radial direction. A generalization of the power-law distribution presented in literature is proposed. Symmetric and asymmetric volume fraction profiles are presented in this paper. Suitable temperature and displacement functions that identically satisfy the boundary conditions at the simply supported edges are used to reduce the thermoelastic equilibrium equations to a set of coupled ordinary differential equations with variable coefficients, which can be solved by generalized differential quadrature method. The fast rate of convergence of the method is demonstrated and to validate the results, comparisons are made with the available solutions for orthotropic shells. The main contribution of this work is to illustrate the influence of the power-law exponent, of the power-law distribution choice and of the choice of the four parameters on the thermal behaviour of continuous grading fiber reinforced cylindrical panels.