Effect of material transverse distribution profile on buckling of thick functionally graded material plates according to TSDT

Several classical and higher order plate theories were used to study the buckling of functionally graded material (FGM) plates. In the great majority of research, a power function is used to represent metal and ceramic material transverse distribution (P-FGM). Therefore, the effect of having other transverse variation of material properties on the buckling behavior of thick rectangular FGM plates was not properly addressed. In the present work, this effect is investigated using the Third order Shear Deformable Theory (TSDT) for the case of simply supported FGM plate. Both a sigmoid function and an exponential functions are used to represent the transverse gradual property variation. The plate governing equations are combined with a Navier type expanded solution of the unknown displacements to derive the buckling equation in terms of the pre-buckling in-plane loads. Finally, the critical in-plane load is calculated for the different buckling modes. The model is verified by a comparison of the calculated buckling loads with available published results of Al-SiC P-FGM plates. The conducted parametric study shows that manufacturing FGM plates with sigmoid variation of properties in the thickness direction increases the buckling load considerably. This improvement is found to be more significant for the case of thick plates than that of thin plates. Results also show that this stiffening-like effect of the sigmoid function profile is more evident for cases where the in-plane loads are applied along the shorter edge of the plate.