Project Description

Face sheets of the tapered composite sandwich plates formed by terminating or dropping of some of the plies in the primary structures with honeycomb core have received much attention recently among the researchers due to their structural tailoring capability, damage tolerance, and potential for creating significant weight savings in engineering applications including robot arms, wing structures of aircrafts, helicopter yokes and blades, and turbine blades. These tapered sandwich structures under thermal environment are often subjected to mechanical time-varying harmonic excitations. So, it is important to investigate the dynamic behaviour of a structure over a wide range of temperatures. Hence, it is not only interesting but also challenging for design engineers to assess the nonlinear responses accurately for laminated composite sandwich structures under thermal environments. , nonlinear dynamic analysis and structural optimization problem can be formulated by considering the various configurations of sandwich tapered sandwich plates with tapered composite plates as the face sheets and honeycomb cores with CNT reinforcement as the core layer (Figure 1). The optimized structures could provide guidelines for the designer to yield maximum natural frequency and damping factors, highest critical buckling temperature of the sandwich structure under various thermal environments.