NURBS-based thermo-elastic analyses of laminated and sandwich composite plates.

Present research work is based on the unique properties of isogeometric analysis (IGA) like smarter, faster and cheaper analysis for the thermo-elastic bending of laminated and sandwich composite plates. IGA, based on isoparametric concept, is a breakthrough in the area of structural analysis, which employs non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) as a basis function to represent less erroneous geometry. Unlike finite-element method (FEM), increasing the polynomial order in IGA gives higher continuous basis functions naturally and easily with reduced computational cost. A procedure has been developed for thermo-elastic bending analysis of laminated composite plates and sandwich structures using IGA approach. The developed NURBS-based code is validated and computational efficacy of thermo-elastic analysis is investigated. A detailed parametric study has been carried out for the quadratic, cubic and quartic NURBS elements with respect to the variation of temperature. Different types of temperature profiles have been considered. Change of deflections, stresses and moment resultants are analysed with an aim to understand the thermo-elastic behaviour of laminated and sandwich composite plates. Several thermo-elastic numerical examples have been analysed extensively. Obtained numerical results are compared with available literature to show the advantage of current formulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]