Bending Behavior of Sandwich Plates with Aggregated CNT-Reinforced Face Sheets

The main aim of this paper is to investigate bending behavior in sandwich plates with functionally graded carbon nanotube reinforced composite (FG-CNTRC) face sheets with considering the effects of carbon nanotube (CNT) aggregation. The sandwich plates are assumed resting on Winkler-Pasternak elastic foundation and a mesh-free method based on first order shear deformation theory (FSDT) is developed to analyze the deflection of sandwich plates. In the face sheets, volume fraction of CNTs and their clusters are considered to be changed along the thickness. To estimate the material properties of the nanocomposite, Eshelby-Mori-Tanaka approach is applied. In the mesh-free analysis, moving least squares (MLS) shape functions are employed to approximate the displacement field and transformation method is used for imposition of essential boundary conditions. The effects of CNT volume fraction, distribution and degree of aggregation, and also boundary conditions and geometric dimensions are investigated on the bending behavior of the sandwich plates. It is observed that in the same value of cluster volume, FG distribution of clusters leads to less deflection in these structures.