Thermal buckling analysis of tapered laminated composite beam: Numerical and experimental investigation

Abstract The present study focuses on the numerical modeling of the thermal buckling behavior of tapered laminated composite beams validated by experimentation. Lagrange's energy‐based governing differential expression was derived utilizing classical laminated plate theory and higher‐order shear deformation theory to analyze the tapered composite beam's thermal buckling property. The uniform temperature rise environment is employed to estimate the critical buckling temperature of the tapered laminated composite beam. The obtained results from the numerical approaches were validated with the experimental results and the previous results obtained from the literature associated with the fundamental frequencies of the structure and critical buckling temperature. The parametric study was incorporated in this present work to investigate the influence of the structural parameters and the geometrical parameters like taper angle, ply orientation, aspect ratio, and boundary constraints of the beam.