A new heat flux continuity model for thermal analysis of laminated plates

Abstract

A new analytical model has been proposed in this paper for the accurate analysis of through-the-thickness temperature variation in composites and sandwich laminates based on piecewise linear zig-zag thermal lamination theory. This theory assumes a piecewise linear through-the-thickness temperature distribution in terms of temperature at the reference plane and temperature slopes at the layer interfaces. The continuity of temperature at different layers is ensured by choosing a suitable temperature profile. The unknown slopes at different interfaces are subsequently expressed in terms of the reference plane slopes through satisfaction of heat flux continuity conditions at the layer interfaces. The thermal conduction properties of different layers in the thickness direction are utilized for this purpose. This helps to maintain lesser number of computational unknowns and the resulting formulation for the thermal analysis can be very conveniently combined with the 2D refined layer-wise theories used for the mechanical analysis of laminated plates. Numerical examples are solved to show the accuracy of the proposed model by comparing the present results with 3D solutions. © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.