Re-examination of thermo-mechanical buckling and postbuckling responses of sandwich plates with porous FG-GPLRC core

The current study re-examines compressive postbuckling and thermal postbuckling responses of porous sandwich plates resting on an elastic foundation. The core of the sandwich plates is made of porous graphene platelets reinforced composite (GPLRC). Compressive postbuckling of the porous sandwich plates under uniaxial compression at elevated temperature and thermal postbuckling of the same plates under uniform thermal loading are studied. The GPLRC core is made of multilayers, and each layer may have different values of porosity coefficient to obtain a piecewise functionally graded (FG) pattern. The Young's moduli along with the shear modulus of the porous GPLRC core are estimated through a generic Halpin–Tsai model in which the porous nature of the material is taken into consideration. The material properties of the metal face sheets and the porous GPLRC core are assumed to be temperature dependent. The governing equations for the postbuckling of the porous sandwich plates reinforced by GPLs are established based on the Reddy's third order shear deformation theory (TSDT). In the modeling, we also consider the von Kármán nonlinear strain–displacement relationships, the plate-foundation interaction and the thermal effect. A two-step perturbation approach is utilized in solving the postbuckling problem. Numerical studies are performed to compare the results obtained from the present model and the equivalent isotropic model (EIM). The results confirm that the EIM is not suitable for analyzing buckling and postbuckling of porous plates.