Buckling and Nonlinear Bending Analysis of Radially Functionally Graded Sector Plates

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the nonlinear bending and buckling analysis of radially functionally graded sector plates subjected to uniform in-plane compressive loads. The mechanical properties of plates assumed to vary continuously along the radial direction by the Mori–Tanaka distribution. The incremental form of nonlinear formulations are derived based on first order shear deformation theory (FSDT) and large deflection von Karman equations. The dynamic relaxation (DR) method combined with the finite difference discretization technique is employed to solve the equilibrium equations. Also, due to the lack of similar research for the buckling of functionally graded sector plates with material variation in the radial direction, some results are compared with the ones reported by the ABAQUS finite element software. The achieved good agreements between the results indicate the accuracy of the present numerical method. Finally, numerical results for the maximum displacement and critical buckling load for various boundary conditions, effects of grading index, thickness-to-radius ratio, sector angle and inner radius-to-outer radius ratio are presented.