Thermal bifurcation buckling of piezoelectric carbon nanotube reinforced composite beams (Q316186)

Thermal influence on materials can sufficiently change their properties. Here, first, a sufficiently detailed review includes several previous reviews of other authors on mechanical, thermal, and electric properties and wide applications of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and carbon nanotubes reinforced composites (CNTRC) as well are presented (there are 45 references). Then a thermal bifurcation buckling behavior of CNTs and CNTRC beams with surface-bounded piezoelectric layers is considered. The governing equations of a piezoelectric CNTRC beam are obtained by use of the known Euler-Bernoulli beam theory and von Karman geometric nonlinearity. Two kinds of CNTRC beams, namely, uniformly distributed (UD) and functionally graded (FG) reinforcements are considered. The material properties of the FG-CNTRC beam are assumed to be graded in the sickness direction only. The single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are assumed to be aligned, straight, and with a uniform layout. The Timoschenko beam theory is used for a dynamic stability analysis of FG-SWCNTs. The exact solutions of the mentioned governing equations are applied for the thermal buckling behavior of beams made of a symmetric SWCNTs with surface-bounded piezoelectric layers. The critical temperature load is found for the nonlinear problem. At last, effects of the applied actuator voltage, temperature regimes, beam geometry, boundary conditions, and volume fractions of carbon nanotubes on the buckling of piezoelectric CNTRC beams are investigated.