Dynamic behaviour of laminated plates subjected to thermomechanical loads

The engineering structures may be subjected to the dynamic loads such as blast. Therefore, in the design of such structures, the effect of the blast loading should be taken into account. There are two possible effects of the blast: sudden pressure and the temperature rise. In this study, a closed form solution is presented for the thermomechanical transient analysis of the simply supported laminated composite plates subjected to blast loading. In-plane stiffness and inertia effects are considered in the formulation of the problem and transverse shear stresses are ignored. The geometric nonlinearity effects are taken into account by using the von Karman large deflection theory of thin plates. Approximate solution functions are assumed for the space domain and substituted into the equations of motion. The Galerkin method is used to obtain the nonlinear differential equations in the time domain. The finite difference method is applied to solve the system of coupled nonlinear equations. The displacement- time and strain-time histories are obtained for critical cases and compared the isothermal condition. The method presented here can be used for the dynamic response analysis of laminated plates in preliminary design.