Investigation of the mechanical properties on the large amplitude free vibrations of the functionally graded material sandwich plates

In this paper, the geometrically nonlinear formulation based on von Karman’s assumptions is employed to study the large amplitude free vibrations of functionally graded materials sandwich plates. The functionally graded material sandwich plate is made up of two layers of power-law functionally graded material face sheet and one layer of ceramic homogeneous core. A hierarchical finite element is employed to define the model, taking into account the effects of the transverse shear deformation and the rotatory inertia. The equations of motion for the nonlinear vibration of the functionally graded material sandwich plates are obtained using Lagrange’s equations. Employing the harmonic balance method, the equations of motion are converted from time domain to frequency domain and then solved iteratively using the linearized updated mode method. Results for linear and nonlinear frequency parameters of the simply supported functionally graded material sandwich plates are computed and compared with the published values, and an excellent agreement was found. The influence of the mechanical properties of the functionally graded material, thickness ratio of FGM layers, and volume fraction exponent on the backbone curves and on the nonlinear frequency parameters are investigated. The effects of the material properties of two different types of ceramics on the large amplitude vibration behaviors of the functionally graded material sandwich plates is also presented and discussed for the first time.