Axiomatic/asymptotic evaluation of refined plate models for thermomechanical analysis

This work deals with refined models for the thermal stress analysis of multilayered plates. The Carrera Unified Formulation has been used in order to generate refined models of any order, and both equivalent single layer (ESL) and layer-wise (LW) schemes have been adopted. A Navier-type solution has been employed and, as a result, only simply supported orthotropic plates have been considered. A linear temperature distribution along the thickness direction is considered. The purpose of this work is to establish the relevance of the displacement variables and to discard the irrelevant terms in order to obtain refined models with the same accuracy as full theories, but with a lower computational cost. The axiomatic/asymptotic technique has been employed. The effectiveness of each displacement variable has been measured considering the influence of several parameters, such as the length-to-thickness ratio (a/h), the stacking sequence and the kind of material (isotropic and orthotropic). The "best" reduced models have been proposed and their relative stress and displacement components distributions along the thickness direction have been discussed. It has been found that the relevance of each displacement variable is affected to a great extent by the problem considered. In addition, it has been demonstrated that the nature of the load (mechanical or thermal) leads to the necessity of retaining different displacement variables for a given problem.