Thermoelastic bending analysis of thick functionally graded sandwich plates with arbitrary graded material properties using a novel quasi-3D HSDT

In this paper, a novel integral higher shear deformation theory including the stretching effect is developed for the thermoelastic bending analysis of symmetric and non-symmetric functionally graded materials (FGM) sandwich plates with an arbitrary gradient. This integral theory has only five unknowns, which is even less than the other shear and normal deformation theories. The proposed model has a reduced number of equations and satisfies automatically the free surface conditions without using the shear correction factor. The present model has a new displacement field which introduces undetermined integral variables. Equations of motion are obtained by utilizing the virtual work principle and solved via Navier’s procedure. The convergence of the proposed theoretical numerical model is performed to demonstrate the efficacy of the model. Moreover, several parametric examples are presented to show the thermoelastic bending response of the various symmetric P-FG sandwich plates with arbitrarily varying material properties.