Static behavior of carbon nanotubes reinforced functionally graded nanocomposite cylindrical panels

Abstract

This chapter deals with the static behavior of carbon nanotubes reinforced functionally graded cylindrical nanocomposite panels. In fact, with the rapid progress of nanotechnology, the use of as kinds of reinforcements in composite structures has attracted the attention of many researchers in the last years. The modeling is based on the Kirchhoff–Love finite element model which constitutes a convenient model to describe the kinematics of shells especially when thin structures are investigated. For the constitutive material law, the modified rule of mixture is adopted which introduces some efficiency parameters to take into account the dependence scale of carbon nanotubes. Four types of distributions of carbon nanotubes are considered which are uniformly and three functionally graded profiles. Static analyses in terms of deflections are presented in order to show the effects of volume fraction of carbon nanotubes as well as the length-to-radius ratio on bending behavior of functionally graded shell structures reinforced by carbon nanotubes. The obtained results are compared to those available in the literature leading hence to outline the performance and the accuracy of the presented model.