Porous Functionally Graded Plates: An Assessment of the Influence of Shear Correction Factor on Static Behavior

Abstract

The known multifunctional characteristic of porous graded materials makes them very attractive in a number of diversified application fields, which simultaneously poses the need to deepen research efforts in this broad field. The study of functionally graded porous materials is a research topic of interest, particularly concerning the modeling of porosity distributions and the corresponding estimations of their material properties—in both real situations and from a material modeling perspective. This work aims to assess the influence of different porosity distribution approaches on the shear correction factor, used in the context of the first-order shear deformation theory, which in turn may introduce significant effects in a structure’s behavior. To this purpose, we evaluated porous functionally graded plates with varying composition through their thickness. The bending behavior of these plates was studied using the finite element method with two quadrilateral plate element models. Verification studies were performed to assess the representativeness of the developed and implemented models, namely, considering an alternative higher-order model also employed for this specific purpose. Comparative analyses were developed to assess how porosity distributions influence the shear correction factor, and ultimately the static behavior, of the plates.