A high-order continuation for bifurcation analysis of functionally graded material sandwich plates (Q2156192)

A weak form of kinematic modeling of the functionally graded material (FGM) sandwich plates adopting higher-order shear deformation plate theory is presented. An alternative to the Newton-Raphson method is the High-Order Continuation (HOC), which is a powerful solver for nonlinear equations. The continuation procedure is introduced to compute the whole solution, in a step-by-step manner. The HOC is associated with the finite element method (FEM) in the HOC-FEM algorithm. The quadrilateral finite element with eight nodes and nine degrees of freedom per node is used in the HOC-FEM taking into account the geometric nonlinearity of von Karman. In this article, in order to reduce the computation time and the number of tangent matrix decompositions, the HOC-FEM for post-buckling of FGM sandwich plates is used. The algorithm HOC-FEM is applied to analysis of the bifurcation of FGM sandwich (multi-layer) plates subjected to various nonuniform loading for the first time. Several detailed parametric studies are performed to investigate the post-buckling behavior of FGM sandwich plates. The accuracy and efficiency of the HOC-FEM are illustrated on numerical examples for FGM plates and FGM sandwich plates.