Combined steady-state nonlinear heat transfer/thermal postbuckling computations in unstiffened and stiffened laminated composite plates and shells (Q1365603)

A computational scheme for the solution of the decoupled (i.e. applied stepwise sequentially) nonlinear steady-state heat transfer and geometrically nonlinear thermoelastic problem is presented for unstiffened and stiffened multilayered composite plates and shells. More specifically, a two-step formulation is conceived; first, the nonuniform temperature field resulting from applied heat fluxes is estimated by considering the three modes of heat transfer, namely nonlinear conduction, convection and radiation; second, the resulting temperatures are used as input to a stress analysis code which performs geometrically nonlinear analysis of composite panels with emphasis on thermal postbuckling computations. For the solution of the heat transfer problem a 3-node triangular shell element is adopted which estimates the temperatures based on a first-order thermal lamination theory by employing primarily Cartesian notation. The nonlinear stress analysis problem is solved using a shallow shell multilayered triangular element of varying and adaptable curvature which can accomodate the dependence of the material properties on the temperature.