Large amplitude vibration of doubly curved FG-GRC laminated panels in thermal environments

A study on the large amplitude vibration of doubly curved graphene-reinforced composite (GRC) laminated panels is presented in this paper. A doubly curved panel is made of piece-wise GRC layers with functionally graded (FG) arrangement along the thickness direction of the panel. A GRC layer consists of polymer matrix reinforced by aligned graphene sheets. The material properties of the GRC layers are temperature dependent and can be estimated by the extended Halpin-Tsai micromechanical model. The modelling of the large amplitude vibration of the panels is based on the Reddy’s higher order shear deformation theory and the effects of the von Kármán geometric nonlinearity, the panel-foundation interaction and the temperature variation are included in the derivation of the motion equations of the panels. The solutions for the large amplitude vibration of the doubly curved FG-GRC laminated panels are obtained by applying a two-step perturbation approach. A parametric study is carried out to determine the influences of foundation stiffness, temperature variation, FG distribution pattern, in-plane boundary condition and panel curvature ratio on the natural frequencies and the nonlinear to linear frequency ratios of the doubly curved FG-GRC laminated panels.