Influence of coupling effects on analytical solutions of functionally graded (FG) spherical shells of revolution

Abstract

Due to the lack of commercially available finite elements packages allowing us to analyse the behaviour of porous functionally graded (FG) structures in this paper, axisymmetric deformations of coupled FG spherical shells are studied. The analytical solution is presented by using complex hypergeometric polynomial series. The results presented agree closely with the reference results for isotropic spherical shells of revolution. The influence of the effects of material properties is characterized by a multiplier characterizing an unsymmetric shell wall construction (stiffness coupling). The results can be easily adopted in design procedures. The present results can be treated as the benchmark for finite element investigations.

Keywords

• spherical shells
• analytical solutions
• porous functionally graded materials
• construction of material properties