On the experimental results of functionally graded materials with computational mechanics approach: Review

Functionally graded materials have been of great interest to researchers for the past two decades. The reason for this is that these materials have outstanding and special material properties compared to many other materials. One of the branches of engineering sciences that has studied these materials in particular during these years is computational mechanics. With this approach, especially static, vibration and buckling analysis, thousands of studies have been done on functionally graded materials. One drawback of these studies is that they are mostly done theoretically and the results of their modeling are not compared with laboratory results although one can find some experimental results in the literature. One reason for not comparing with experimental results could be that these experimental results are buried under tons of theoretical results and do not appear to researchers at all. Our aim in this mini-review is to bring some of these experimental results on functionally graded materials to the showcase for the attention of researchers. The experimental results presented in this article are categorized as follow: a) axially layered FG structure b) axially continuous FG structure c) layered FG structure with variation of properties in the thickness direction d) continuous FG structure with variation of properties in the thickness direction e) FG nanocomposite.