Effects of Thermo-Mechanical Loads on Aeroelastic Instabilities of Metallic and Composite Panels

Panel flutter phenomena can be strongly affected by thermal loads,and so a refined aeroelastic model is presented.Higher-order shell theories are used as structural models.The aerodynamic forces are described using the Piston theory.The temperature is considered uniform over the thickness of the panel.The aero-thermo-elastic model is derived in the framework of the Carrera unified formulation(CUF),therefore the matrices are expressed in a compact form using the″fundamental nuclei″.Composite and sandwich structures are considered and different boundary conditions are taken into account.The effects of the thermal load on the aeroelastic behavior are investigated.

Advanced modeling of embedded piezo-electric transducers for the health-monitoring of layered structures

The present paper presents an innovative approach for the numerical modeling of piezo-electric transducers for the health-monitoring of layered structures.The numerical approach has been developed in the frameworks of the Carrera Unified Formulation.This computa-tional tool allows refined numerical models to be derived in a unified and efficient fashion.The use of higher-order models and the cap-ability to connect different kinematic models using the node-depen-dent kinematic approach has led to an efficient modeling technique for global-local analysis.This approach can refine the model only in those regions where it is required,e.g.,the areas where piezo-electric transducers are placed.The model has been used to study embedded and surface-mounted sensors.The accuracy of the pre-sent model has been verified by comparing the current results with numerical and experimental data from the literature.Different mod-eling solutions have been developed,mixing one-,two-and threedimensional finite elements.The results show that the use of the present modeling technique allows the computational cost to be reduced with respect to the classical approaches preserving the ccuracy of the results in the critical areas.

Buckling of thin-walled beams by a refined theory

The buckling of thin-walled structures is presented using the 1D finite element based refined beam theory formulation that permits us to obtain N-order expansions for the three displacement fields over the section domain.These higher-order models are obtained in the framework of the Carrera unified formulation(CUF).CUF is a hierarchical formulation in which the refined models are obtained with no need for ad hoc formulations.Beam theories are obtained on the basis of Taylor-type and Lagrange polynomial expansions.Assessments of these theories have been carried out by their applications to studies related to the buckling of various beam structures,like the beams with square cross section,I-section,thin rectangular cross section,and annular beams.The results obtained match very well with those from commercial finite element softwares with a significantly less computational cost.Further,various types of modes like the bending modes,axial modes,torsional modes,and circumferential shell-type modes are observed.