Vibration of Functionally Graded Material Plates with Cutouts & Cracks in Thermal Environment
In this paper, the effect of a centrally located cutout (circular and elliptical) and cracksemanating from the cutout on the free flexural vibration behaviour of functionally graded materialplates in thermal environment is studied. The discontinuity surface is represented independent of themesh by exploiting the partition of unity method framework. A Heaviside function is used to capturethe jump in the displacement across the discontinuity surface and asymptotic branch functions areused to capture the singularity around the crack tip. An enriched shear flexible 4-noded quadrilateralelement is used for the spatial discretization. The properties are assumed to vary only in the thicknessdirection. The effective properties of the functionally graded material are estimated using the Mori-Tanaka homogenization scheme and the plate kinematics is based on the first order shear deformationtheory. The influence of the plate geometry, the geometry of the cutout, the crack length, the thermalgradient and the boundary conditions on the free flexural vibration is numerically studied.