Imperfection sensitivity of the post-buckling behavior of higher-order shear deformable functionally graded plates

This paper investigates the sensitivity of the post-buckling behavior of shear deformable functionally graded plates to initial geometrical imperfections in general modes. A generic imperfection function that takes the form of the product of trigonometric and hyperbolic functions is used to model various possible initial geometrical imperfections such as sine type, local type, and global type imperfections. The formulations are based on Reddy’s higher-order shear deformation plate theory and von Karman-type geometric nonlinearity. A semi-analytical method that makes use of the one-dimensional differential quadrature method, the Galerkin technique, and an iteration process is used to obtain the post-buckling equilibrium paths of plates with various boundary conditions that are subjected to edge compressive loading together with a uniform temperature change. Special attention is given to the effects of imperfection parameters, which include half-wave number, amplitude, and location, on the post-buckling response of plates. Numerical results presented in graphical form for zirconia/aluminum (ZrO₂/Al) graded plates reveal that the post-buckling behavior is very sensitive to the L2-mode local type imperfection. The influences of the volume fraction index, edge compression, temperature change, boundary condition, side-to-thickness ratio and plate aspect ratio are also discussed.