LAUSR

Abstract This work investigates the effect of a thermal shock loading on the rotating multilayer functionally graded graphene platelets reinforced composite (FG-GPLRC) truncated conical shells. The problem is tackled numerically according to the Lord-Shulman (L-S) thermoelastic theory. The multilayer FG-GPLRC conical shells are decomposed into a set of co-axial nanocomposite shell layers, to capture accurately the variation of the thermoelastic field variables due to the layerwise variation of the material properties. The transformed differential quadrature method (TDQM) and a multi-step time integration scheme based on a non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) interpolation is applied to discretize the thermoelastic equations together with the related boundary conditions and compatibility conditions at the interface of two neighboring layers. After a preliminary validation of the approach, a parametric study aims at investigating the effect of different graphene platelets (GPLs) distribution patterns, GPLs weight fraction and dimension ratios, as well as the effect of the shell angular velocity and geometry parameters on the thermoelastic response of the system. It is verified that the addition of a small amount of GPLs in the polymer matrix increases significantly the heat wave speed, affects the thermoelastic field variables, and decreases the period of oscillatory portions of the mechanical field variables.