Analysis of laminated beams with temperature-dependent material properties subjected to thermal and mechanical loads

This work focuses on the temperature, displacement and stress analysis of simply-supported laminated beams with temperature-dependent material properties subjected to thermal and mechanical loads. The temperature is considered to be constant along the length of the beam, however, varies along the thickness. A thin-layer model is introduced for analysis: every layer of the beam is divided into finite sublayers, each of which is approximately assumed to have uniform material properties. Based on Fourier's law, the temperature field is obtained by an iterative algorithm. Based on the thermo-elasticity theory, the two-dimensional displacement and stress solutions are obtained by using the transfer-matrix method. The comparative study shows that the results from the two-dimensional finite element method agree well with the present ones; however, the results from the classical beam theory have considerable errors, especially for thick beams. Finally a sandwich beam is taken as an example. The analysis reveals that the temperature not only produces deformations and stresses itself, but also affects the deformations and stresses induced by mechanical loads.