Thermally Induced Instability of Laminated Beams and Plates

Abstract

A theoretical investigation of dynamic stability for linear elastic structures due to non-uniform, time and space-dependent stochastic temperature fields is presented. The study is based on the reformulation of stochastic stability problems as a stability of Itô type equations in some appropriate Hilbert space and is adopted for stability problems of structures with time and space-dependent stochastic coefficients. Uniform stochastic stability criteria of the structure equilibrium are derived using the Liapunov direct method. The energy-like functional and the generalized ltô lemma are used to derive the sufficient stability conditions of the equilibrium state. A symmetrically laminated crossply plate subjected to the wide-band Gaussian temperature distribution and a laminated beam subjected to local short-time heatings are analysed in detail.