Recently, many numerical and experimental studies on the mechanical behavior of functionally graded (FG) structures have been carried out as they are widely used in various fields of engineering due to their benefits such as high stiffness, light weight and high thermal resistance.
Sin Chol Nam, a section head at the Faculty of Mechanical Science and Technology, has proposed a meshfree Jacobi-radial point interpolation (Jacobi-RPI) method for the dynamic analysis of a functionally graded elliptical shell with varying thickness (FGESVT) in supersonic flow and thermal environment.
He assumed the material properties of FGESVT to vary along the direction perpendicular to the bottom surface. He considered the thermal stress due to the variation of environmental temperature by introducing the nonlinear part of the Green–Lagrange strain. He constructed a meshfree shape function by combining the radial basis with Jacobi polynomials with fast convergence, numerical stability and high accuracy. He expanded the displacement components of the FGESVT by using the meshfree Jacobi-RPI shape function. He obtained the equations of motion of the closed FGESVT by coupling the equations of several open shells.
He has validated the accuracy and reliability of the proposed method through a sufficient number of numerical studies for the free vibration and dynamic response analysis of open and closed FGESVT.
For more details, please refer to his paper “A meshfree method for thermodynamic analysis of functionally graded elliptical shell with varying thickness in supersonic flow” in “Archive of Applied Mechanics” (SCI).