Three-dimensional thermoelastic analysis of orthotropic laminated cylindrical shells subjected to uniformly localized thermal boundary conditions

Abstract Accurate evaluation of three-dimensional (3D) thermal-elastic analysis of laminated cylindrical shells under different loads has a significant impact on their safety design. In this study, we present a 3D thermoelastic solution of laminated orthotropic cylindrical shells subjected to uniformly localized thermal boundary conditions. For a homogeneous orthotropic layer, a thinning layer approach is introduced to deal with the heat conduction equation and the elastic equation. Based on the eigenequation method and pseudo-Stroh formalism, general solutions for physical quantities of a homogeneous layer are derived. The propagator matrix method is used to deal with multilayered media. A closed form solution for the laminated cylindrical shells is obtained. A numerical example of a 3-layered cylindrical shell subjected to convective heat transfer boundary conditions is presented to verify the solutions’ correctness. An excellent convergence of the current approach is found and the physical quantities predicted by the current method agree well with the numerical results by the finite element method. Finally, the numerical solutions of a 3-layered orthotropic cylindrical shell subjected to uniformly localized thermal boundary conditions are obtained by the current method. The closed form solution presented in this article can be used for 3D thermoelastic analysis of laminated cylindrical shells under complex boundary conditions.