A yield-criteria tailoring of the volume fraction in metal-ceramic functionally graded material

A reduction of the absolute effective stress level may not be appropriate to prevent the yielding occurrence in functionally graded materials (FGMs) in which the yield stress is varying spatially with the volume fraction of constituents. In order to suppress the thermal stress level effectively in heat-resisting FGMs such that it does not exceed the yield stress, we introduce a yield-criterial optimization of the volume fraction distribution. The objective function is defined by linearly combining the total strain energy and the peak effective stress scaled by the spatial-varying yield stress. The validity and robustness of the material optimization method proposed are verified through illustrative numerical experiments.