Advanced fully coupled thermo-mechanical plate elements for multilayered structures subjected to mechanical and thermal loading

This paper presents a hierarchical modeling for the analysis of multilayered structures subjected to mechanical and thermal loadings. The principle of virtual displacement is applied in the framework of the Carrera unified formulation to obtain a complete family of plate finite elements. The order of the variable description through the plate-thickness direction can be set in the range from one to four. The results in the form of tables and graphs are given to validate the proposed elements. Pure mechanical and fully coupled thermo-mechanical cases studies are proposed. The application of Fourier's law is not required since the plate-thickness temperature profile is automatically obtained in the framework of the proposed approach. The numerical results are obtained through the MUL2 academic code.