Buckling and Postbuckling of Concentrically Stiffened Piezo-Composite Plates on Elastic Foundations

This research presents the modeling and analysis for the buckling and postbuckling behavior of sandwich plates under thermal and mechanical loads. The lay-up configurations of plates are laminated composite with concentric stiffener and surface mounted piezoelectric actuators. The plates are in contact with a three-parameter elastic foundation including softening and/or hardening nonlinearity. Several types of grid shapes of stiffeners are studied such as ortho grid, angle grid, iso grid, and orthotropic grid. The equations of structures are formulated based on the classical lamination theory incorporating nonlinear von-Karman relationships. The stress function and Galerkin procedure are applied to derive explicit formulations of the equilibrium paths. New results are introduced to give the influences of voltage through the thickness of piezoelectric actuators, different stiffeners, and nonlinear elastic foundations.