This research is devoted to investigating the thermal buckling analysis behaviour of laminated composite plates subjected to uniform and non-uniform temperature fields by applying an analytical model based on a refined plate theory (RPT) with five unknown independent variables. The theory accounts for the parabolic distribution of the transverse shear strains through the plate thickness and satisfies the zero-traction boundary condition on the surface without using shear correction factors; hence a shear correction factor is not required. The governing differential equations and associated boundary conditions are derived by using the virtual work principle and solved via Navier-type analytical procedure to obtain critical buckling temperature. Results are presented for: uniform and linear cross-ply lamination with symmetry and antisymmetric stacking, simply supported boundary condition, different aspect ratio (a/b), various orthogonality ratio (E1/E2), varying ratios of coefficient of uniform and linear thermal expansion (α2⁄α1), uniform and linearly varying temperature thickness ratio (a/h) and numbers of layers on thermal buckling of the laminated plate. It can be concluded that this theory gives good results compared to other theories.
This work is licensed under a