Thermal stresses in thick laminated composite shells

Abstract

The paper provides an analytical formulation to investigate the thermomechanical behavior of thick composite shells subjected to a temperature distribution which varies arbitrarily in the radial direction. For illustrative purposes, shells under uniform temperature change are presented. It is found that thermal twist would occur even for symmetric laminated shells. Under uniform temperature rise, results for off-axis graphite/epoxy shells show that extensional-shear coupling can cause tensile radial stress throughout the shell and tensile hoop stress in the inner region. Laminated graphite/epoxy shells can exhibit negative effective thermal expansion coefficients in the longitudinal and transverse directions. Finally, the stacking sequence has a strong influence on the thermal stress distributions.