Postbuckling responses of functionally graded cylindrical shells under axial compression and thermal loads

This paper presents a postbuckling analysis of functionally graded cylindrical shells under axial compression and thermal loads using the element-free kp-Ritz method. The formulation is developed to handle problems of small strains and moderate rotations, based on the first-order shear deformation shell theory and von Kármán strains. The effective material properties of the shells are assumed to be continuous along their thickness direction, and are obtained using a power-law distribution of the volume fractions of the constituents. The approximations of the two-dimensional displacement fields are expressed in terms of a set of mesh-free kernel particle functions. The system bending stiffness is evaluated using a stabilized conforming nodal integration method and the membrane and shear terms are estimated using direct nodal integration to eliminate shear locking. The postbuckling path is traced using a combination of the arc-length and mesh-free kp-Ritz methods. The proposed formulation is validated by comparing the results of the proposed method with those in the literature. The postbuckling responses of two types of functionally graded conical shells, one composed of Al/ZrO ₂ and the other of SUS304/Si ₃N ₄, are investigated and the effects of volume fraction, boundary condition, and length-to-thickness ratio on postbuckling behavior are discussed in detail. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.